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

Petra Security · San Francisco

Who We Are

We’re on a mission to stop the most dominant cyberattacks on the planet.

Cybersecurity titans are born when a new attack vector overwhelms existing defenses. When ransomware ran rampant, CrowdStrike emerged as the category leader for securing user endpoints. Today, AI has made account compromise the #1 cybercrime. LLM-powered phishing messages get past email security, allowing attackers to compromise accounts and exfiltrate sensitive data in minutes. Incumbents can't keep up. They catch these attacks late, or miss them altogether.

Enter Petra, security for when no perimeter remains. We are building an AI-driven Detection and Response platform to catch and remove attackers before they can act.

We've grown very quickly, reaching mid-7-figures in ARR in under a year — we now protect over 1.6 million users across 10,000+ businesses. We win 90%+ of head-to-heads. We price premium, yet have extremely low customer churn. Our customers consistently tell us that Petra is the best product they've ever used. You can see a demo here.

This is a rare chance to join early and help scale to $20M+ in revenue in the next 12 months.

Our founders are YC W24, ex-Abnormal Security, Palo Alto Networks, and Bridgewater.

What You’ll Do

Ownership is everything here. You'll have deep knowledge across the stack and own large parts of the platform — from our AI detection pipeline to the product surfaces that MSPs and security teams rely on every day.

Petra is a premium product and it's everyone's job to make sure it stays that way. That means you won't just write code — you'll talk to customers, map their workflows, find their time-sinks, and think creatively about how to make the product increasingly excellent.

Concretely, you will:

  • Build and evolve our detection platform. Working closely with our founding team, you'll help design and build the systems that identify account compromise in real time — spanning signal ingestion, behavioral analysis, and AI-powered decisioning.

  • Drive product quality end to end. Take problems from raw customer insight through to shipped, production features. You care about the full loop, not just your slice.

  • Architect for scale. We're growing fast. Make calls that let us move quickly today without incurring debt that bites us at 10x the user base.

  • Raise the technical bar. As a senior voice on a lean team, your instincts and opinions shape how we build. You'll establish patterns, push for correctness, and raise the quality of everything around you.

Our stack is Node, TypeScript, React, and Python... for now.

Who You Are

  • 3+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful time in production systems at scale.

  • Deep full-stack fluency — comfortable owning a feature from data model to UI, with strong opinions about where to draw the lines.

  • Experience building data-intensive or real-time systems. Bonus if you've worked on security, fraud detection, or anomaly detection pipelines.

  • Strong ML/AI integration experience — you've shipped systems that use models in production, not just experimented with them.

  • High agency and high output. You don't wait for a spec — you identify the problem, propose the solution, and execute. You ship fast, find the 90/10, and don't let perfect be the enemy of done.

  • Sharp and scrappy. You learn fast, ask the right questions, and figure it out — whether that's a technical tradeoff, the right abstraction, or the right shortcut.

  • Comfortable in a small-team, high-autonomy environment. The scope of your work is rarely handed to you, and you wouldn't have it any other way.

  • Proud of your craft. You care about building things that work well and hold up over time.

Benefits and Pay:

  • Competitive salary — we pay top dollar for exceptional engineers

  • Equity

  • Fully covered healthcare, dental, vision

  • Lunch, dinner, and snacks at the office

  • Relocation support

This role is in-person, here in SF.