Key Takeaways

  • 75% of U.S. employers use automated applicant tracking systems to screen resumes before a human reviews them (Harvard Business School & Accenture, 2021)
  • The most common ATS failures are missing keywords, incompatible formatting, and incorrect file types
  • ResumeGeni scores your resume across 8 parsing layers — modeled on the same steps enterprise ATS platforms like Workday, Greenhouse, and Taleo use to evaluate candidates

How ATS Resume Scoring Works

Applicant tracking systems parse your resume into structured data — extracting your name, contact info, work history, skills, and education — then score how well that data matches the job requirements. Many ATS rejections happen because the parser couldn't extract critical fields, not because the candidate wasn't qualified.

LayerWhat It ChecksWhy It Matters
Document extractionFile format, encoding, readabilityCorrupted or image-only PDFs fail immediately
Layout analysisTables, columns, headers, footersMulti-column layouts break field extraction
Section detectionExperience, education, skills headingsNon-standard headings cause sections to be missed
Field mappingName, email, phone, dates, titlesMissing contact info is a common cause of immediate rejection
Keyword matchingJob-specific terms, skills, certificationsKeyword overlap affects recruiter search visibility and ATS scoring
Chronology checkDate ordering, gap detectionReverse-chronological order is expected by most ATS
QuantificationMetrics, numbers, measurable outcomesQuantified achievements help human reviewers and some scoring models
Confidence scoringOverall parse quality and completenessLow-confidence parses get deprioritized in results

Frequently Asked Questions

Is ResumeGeni free?
Yes. ResumeGeni is currently in beta — ATS analysis, scoring, and initial improvement suggestions are free with no signup required. Full guidance and saved reports may require a free account.
What file formats are supported?
PDF, DOCX, DOC, TXT, RTF, ODT, and Apple Pages. PDF and DOCX are recommended for best ATS compatibility.
How is the ATS score calculated?
Your resume is processed through an 8-layer parsing pipeline that extracts structured data the same way enterprise ATS platforms do. The score reflects how completely and accurately your resume can be parsed, plus how well your content matches common ATS ranking criteria.
Can ATS read PDF resumes?
Yes, but not all PDFs are equal. Text-based PDFs parse well. Image-only PDFs (scanned documents) and PDFs with complex tables or multi-column layouts often fail ATS parsing. Our analyzer will flag these issues.
How do I improve my ATS score?
Focus on three areas: use a clean single-column format, include keywords from the job description naturally in your experience bullets, and ensure all sections (contact, experience, education, skills) use standard headings.

ATS Guides & Resources

Built by engineers with 12 years of experience building enterprise hiring technology at ZipRecruiter. Last updated .

Senior Software Engineer, Site Reliability

Parabola Io · New York, New York

About Us:

Parabola is a workflow builder that makes it easy to organize and transform messy data from anywhere—even PDFs, emails, and spreadsheets—so that forward-thinking teams can automate the work they thought would always be manual.

Teams at fast-moving companies like Brooklinen, On Running, and Flexport use Parabola to save hundreds of hours and finally take on the projects that used to feel out of reach. Whether it’s reconciling inventory across multiple 3PLs, auditing invoices, or manually exporting the same report every Monday, Parabola gives teams the power to automate it—all without needing engineering support.

Parabola is backed by OpenView Partners, Matrix Partners, Thrive Capital and more.

About the role:

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer on our rapidly growing team, you’ll measure how well our software is working, and from that baseline propel us towards high impact improvements that our customers value. Given our small team, your work might span performance, developer experience, security & compliance, and foundational architecture work. You’ll also be on-call and will improve our technical operations, learning as we go.

What you'll be doing:

  • Monitoring our core business-logic software, both via on-call and in non-urgent situations: describing its existing behavior and defining SLOs or SLAs that get us (you and we) to respond.

  • Extending and monitoring our infrastructure stack. Because we are B2B, we have fewer raw users, but their usage is often business-critical and we need the infrastructure for that.

  • Maintaining both a mental and a reified model of our systems: from this model, estimating risk, planning projects, and debugging efficiently.

  • Collaborating with our engineering team and company leadership from your unique lens on site reliability — being vocal and clear in your expertise in this specialization

  • Working on our core orchestration logic that determines how to efficiently run tens of thousands of workflows at the same time - we recently rebuilt our orchestrator on top of Temporal and we love it!

  • Advising many parallel major backend engineering projects, both early in planning and through release. Join such projects for building from time-to-time.

  • Optimizing our services for scalability, stability, and observability as our customer base grows and our product becomes more sophisticated.

  • Improving our developer experience in tactical ways, and improving our overall engineering processes and practices more broadly, especially given the opportunities & pressures of LLM coding agents.

What (we think) you'll need to do it:

  • 5+ years of SRE, DevOps, or Platform engineering experience

  • A proven record of building efficient, performant, and easy to extend systems.

  • Has maintained quantitative metrics of site reliability, while also demonstrating judgment about appropriate strictness for SLOs & SLAs. Given our team size, the expectations are somewhat less formal and mature than many SRE teams have; you will both strengthen our approach, but also navigate tradeoffs.

  • Familiarity with containerization and orchestration tools (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) and how they interact with backend services, and with Linux

  • Experience implementing and managing AWS infrastructure

  • You’re not afraid to ask for help, and you’re happy to give it, too.

  • You’re an enthusiastic communicator and you like working with a team that provides both mutual support and thoughtful critique.

  • You're excited to join a hybrid team and work out of our NYC or SF office ~3 days a week.

Nice to haves:

  • Experience with Temporal.

  • Experience building AI platforms, or the tooling and systems behind AI products.

  • Familiarity with Kubernetes/Helm (we use Amazon EKS).

  • Experience implementing and deploying infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) tools to manage production cloud environments

  • Experience managing CI/CD pipeline for multiple environments, and developer experience more broadly

  • Experience building cloud storage or data modeling products.

  • Experience working at early stage startups.

Salary Range: $180,000 - $200,000

This salary range represents the minimum and maximum for this role based in San Francisco and New York. The salary given for this position is dependent on multiple factors, including years of experience, interview performance and anticipated responsibilities of the role. Our base salary is one component of Parabola’s competitive total package, which also includes equity and premium health and wellness benefits.