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 .

Full Stack Engineer

Reset · Remote, United States

About Reset

Reset’s mission is to improve the financial health of everyday Americans by giving them fee-free access to the income they’ve already earned. We believe income should be available when it’s earned, not delayed, and that better timing, paired with the right tools, can fundamentally change how people manage their money and put them in a position to financially thrive. We deliver this by working through credit unions and community banks, embedding these capabilities directly into the financial institutions people already trust.

We’re a public benefit corporation with a deep commitment to social impact. To date, we’ve raised over $7M from top investors and strategic partners. Our founding team has expertise in fintech and enterprise software from years of leading teams at Visa, Salesforce, and Upstart.

About the Role

We’re looking for an experienced, product-minded, AI-forward engineer to join our small but high-leverage engineering team. You will work closely with the CTO to build and evolve the systems that power Reset, from core product experiences to integrations with financial institution partners—helping deliver on our mission to improve financial health through fee-free access to earned income.

You thrive in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment. You think in systems, make thoughtful product and technical tradeoffs, and ship code. You’re looking for ownership and the opportunity to shape both product and how engineering gets done. Your work will directly impact how people access and use their money on a daily basis.

This role is open to candidates anywhere in the United States.

What You’ll Focus on First

Real-Time Transaction Decisioning

  • Build systems that make real-time authorization decisions on card transactions, leveraging modern card network capabilities

  • Design systems that dynamically adjust how much a user can spend based on their income and cash flow, as new information becomes available

  • Work on edge cases where money, timing, and user expectations don’t line up cleanly

  • Ensure systems are both fast (sub-second decisions) and correct when real money is on the line

Integrating with Real-World Financial Systems

  • Build integrations with partners in the banking and payments ecosystem, each with their own constraints, nuances, and success criteria

  • Represent Reset in technical conversations with partners, helping move integrations forward and unblock issues quickly

  • Design systems that remain reliable even when upstream systems are delayed, incomplete, or wrong

  • Debug real-world issues across distributed systems where you don’t control all the pieces

  • Turn one-off integrations into reusable patterns that make future partners faster to onboard

Where This Role Grows

As you help scale our engineering efforts, you will take on broader technical and strategic responsibilities:

  • System design and architecture: Drive architectural decisions as product complexity increases, particularly around real-time decisioning and external integrations

  • Technical leadership: Help define engineering standards, patterns, and practices as the team grows

  • Product ownership: Take ownership of major product areas or partner implementations end-to-end

  • Technical strategy: Contribute to build vs. buy decisions and long-term system design across our financial and data infrastructure

What You Bring

  • Strong engineering judgment in ambiguous environments. You make decisions with incomplete information, think in tradeoffs, and know when to move fast vs. be careful

  • Experience building and operating production systems where reliability matters

  • Strong product intuition, with the ability to translate customer and business needs into product and technical decisions

  • AI as a force multiplier in your workflow

  • Strong full stack capability

  • Experience working with external systems and imperfect data

  • Ability to operate externally with partners, including scoping integrations, debugging issues, and driving alignment

  • High ownership and accountability for outcomes

Technical Experience

  • Experience building and shipping production systems

  • Strong full stack and backend/API design experience

  • Experience with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL)

  • Familiarity with cloud platforms and production systems

  • Experience integrating with third-party APIs

Bonus Points

  • Experience in fintech, payments, or financial systems

  • Experience with AWS, Heroku, or similar infrastructure

  • Experience with mobile (iOS or Android) in embedded or partner contexts

Tech Stack

We use the following technologies today. Experience with similar tools is completely fine.

Backend: Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL

Frontend: React

Infrastructure: Heroku

Equal Opportunity Employer

Reset is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and is committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We hire candidates of any race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital or family status, disability, veteran status, and any other status. We believe that having a workforce of varying backgrounds, skills, and ideas enables us to better serve our customers and uplift our communities. Lastly, strong candidates may not meet every single qualification listed – we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to still submit an application if you’re interested in the role even if you don’t meet every single qualification.