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 .

Staff Software Engineer, AI

Peregrinetechnologies · New York, NY

Backed by leading Silicon Valley investors, Peregrine helps the world’s most complex organizations solve their hardest problems with unprecedented speed and accuracy. Our AI-enabled platform turns siloed and disconnected data into operational intelligence—instantly surfacing mission-critical information to empower better, faster decisions that improve outcomes at every touchpoint. Today, Peregrine supports hundreds of customers across 23 states and two countries, serving more than 90 million people—and we’re amplifying our impact as we expand into more industries.

We’re a team of entrepreneurs—undaunted by the hard problems and united by a passion to make a difference where it matters most. We collaborate relentlessly, move with urgency, and act with purpose. If you’re driven by mission and energized by the opportunity to build something new, join us in defining Peregrine’s future.

Team

As an engineering team, we believe strongly that empathy improves our solutions. Seeing how people use the product is a priority and the way we get to the right answer. Engineers will have the opportunity to work closely with our team onsite to understand the variety of use cases that Peregrine serves.

We value both ownership and collaboration—you will take full responsibility for major features and work closely with other engineers to drive them to completion. We believe that humility and empathy are essential for building the right solutions—you will collaborate directly with our deployment team and users as we iterate to solve their problems. Perseverance and creativity are crucial to executing our vision.

Role

As a member of our new AI team, you’ll be instrumental in delivering differentiated value to our customers. This team is charged with crafting powerful, intuitive user experiences powered by generative AI. You'll unlock entirely new ways for users to interact with our platform—whether through natural language commands or by enabling AI agents to handle complex tasks on their behalf. Your work will shape safe, impactful AI-driven features that help customers solve real-world problems with greater speed and ease.

Your scope of work will include a wide range of complex challenges, including scaling our platform to handle terabytes of data ingested from a variety of sources, efficiently querying and notifying users on this data in realtime, and optimizing search algorithms to serve results quickly.

Our stack is constantly evolving but based on a backend foundation of Python, Django, Celery, Airflow, and Kafka; a frontend built in React, Redux, and Mapbox; data stores including PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch; machine learning models hosted in Bedrock and Sagemaker; and with AWS, Pulumi, Terraform, and Kubernetes as our underlying infrastructure.

About you

  • Desire and drive to own large portions of the application from start to finish
  • Passion for crafting and shipping software solutions that delight users
  • Thrive on ambiguity and love taking on hard problems
  • Excellent technical vision with the ability to synthesize product requests into strong and reliable software components

What we look for

  • Understanding of best practices for using generative AI responsibly, with bonus experience applying LLMs to enhance user experience
  • Degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience
  • Over 8 years of experience working with cross-functional software development teams.
  • Experience shipping and iterating on production-grade software components professionally and / or in the open-source community
  • Ability to write robust, well tested, and well-designed code that frequently gets deployed to users
  • Solid understanding of architecting and scaling distributed software systems
  • Strong best practices in modern software development and comfort navigating large codebases
  • Located in NYC and open to working in office

Salary Range: $200,000 - $275,000 Annually + Benefits + Equity (if applicable) + Bonus (if applicable)

Peregrine Technologies is committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We celebrate diversity and are a proud equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

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