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 .

Lead Product Engineer

Riskledger · London

About us

Risk Ledger is developing a network of connected organisations, all working together to defend against cybersecurity attacks in the supply chain.

Organisations rely on us to establish trust, through sharing their security maturity and visualising the risks posed by their supply chain ecosystem. And we’re already trusted by customers like ASOS, British Airways, BAE Systems and the NHS.

We are putting together an amazing and talented team from a diverse set of backgrounds and skillsets to drive us towards our vision. Risk Ledger is built on the respect we have for one another and our users, united by our shared values and mission.

Every one of us is still learning: it’s how we grow as individuals. We’re curious. We’re ambitious. And we’re humble and honest. At Risk Ledger, we aim high to find the best solutions we can and always put our users first.

The team:

You’ll join a cross-functional department of Software Engineers, Product Managers and Designers, all collaborating together with the wider business to achieve impactful product outcomes.

Everyone is involved from day one in shaping opportunities that provide outsized value to both clients and suppliers on Risk Ledger, keeping our users as top priority.

We care deeply about building the right thing, in order to fundamentally shift mindsets in the cybersecurity industry. We ship quickly & continuously in order to learn and iterate - whilst always pushing for the highest possible quality bar and keeping security and automation front and centre.

The core of our stack is GoLang, AWS, and Vue.js, with modern design philosophies and a cloud-native approach.

This role:

Our Product Engineers play a crucial role in our user and product experience. You will be focused on solving innovative end-to-end product challenges in the best manner for our customers. Whilst you may have a natural inclination towards the backend or frontend, we expect you to have a good breadth of knowledge across the stack. You'll delve into all aspects of our tech stack and product portfolio, having meaningful impact on our customers, and the overall success of the business.

As a Lead engineer, you'll typically be anchored to a single squad - often in a Tech Lead position - but you'll be expected to influence across all of our squads, and help to set high standards and consistency across the organisation. You should expect to operate at varying levels of detail across the stack and may have to manage multiple priorities simultaneously.

You’ll be collaborating on a daily basis with designers, product managers, other engineers and the wider business to create a great product experience and continuously ship value to our users. You'll be expected to mentor others within your squad and instil extremely high quality bars and effective modes of operation across our technology organisation. You will also have input into our engineering strategy.

In the role you will:

  • Collaborate to deliver an exceptional product. From understanding initial needs to crafting outstanding solutions, you'll work directly with product managers and designers to bring ideas to life. And by that, we don’t just mean implement requirements, we expect our engineers to understand our market and customers in order to be able to influence product strategy and challenge assumptions.
  • Develop high quality systems and code. Working across our stack, you’ll design and develop the systems that underpin the Risk Ledger product and advance us towards our vision.
  • Move fast, with an eye for quality. You enjoy moving fast while maintaining an extremely high quality bar through testing, automation, discipline, consistency and best practice, whilst treading a careful line in pragmatism and cost-benefit analysis.
  • Enjoy being a generalist. We are building an amazing and talented team from a diverse set of backgrounds and skillsets. Our engineers are empowered to work in all areas of our platform, and across all areas of the business, directly contributing to the wider success of the company.
  • Nurture the talent and growth of the team. You will be able to mentor junior - senior level colleagues to level up both hands-on technical and architectural decision making skills.
  • Have an impact. We're a growing startup - so you’ll have the opportunity to get involved in areas outside of your day to day role.

You’ll have:

  • Worked in multiple engineering teams focused on building a customer focused SaaS product; weighing up delivering value to clients against technical excellence.
  • Deep experience with either backend or frontend development.
    • Backend language preferably Go; or something like Java, C# or Python
    • Frontend: Typescript preferably with VueJS or React
  • In either case, reasonable additional experience with:
    • SQL and 'NoSQL' Data stores, with deep knowledge of data model design
    • Containers and Orchestration: Docker / Kubernetes
    • Cloud providers and cloud native services, preferably AWS
    • Event driven systems, and messaging services such as SQS/SNS, Kafka or RabbitMQ
  • Experience being the lead in the design of non-trivial solutions, working with others to implement.
  • A desire to deeply understand our customers and the problems they face, in order to improve their day-to-day experience.
  • An ability to thrive in ambiguity, tackling problems that might not be well defined and without obvious solutions, and comfortable operating autonomously.
  • A keen sense of curiosity, with a natural drive to learn and grow.
  • A passion to work collaboratively with others. We like to work as a team, not a collection of individuals and we expect you to have the same mindset. Passion for pairing, mobbing and other XP principles are a strong plus.

You might have:

  • Participated in mentoring other members of your team. While this role will be hands-on technical as an individual contributor, we do expect Lead Engineers to take on some nurturing responsibility, and general tech leadership.
  • A startup/scale-up background. We’re not concerned if you have not worked in this environment, as long as you are willing to get stuck into the ambiguity of an early stage company.
  • Experience of data processing, machine learning, AI or integrating large datasets into a product.
  • Worked with observability solutions (Kibana, Grafana, Sentry).


Salary range
£110,000£130,000 GBP

The perks:

  • 💰Competitive base salary
  • 📈Generous EMI equity package
  • 👌Private pension
  • ✈️25 days annual leave + bank holidays
  • 🏖Additional 30 days of unpaid leave per year to use as you wish
  • 🎆Ad-hoc companywide time off - last year we gave everyone 'rest leave' in August and over the festive period
  • 🏥Private healthcare with AXA Insurance - including enhanced mental wellbeing coverage
  • 🏠Hybrid working policy, typically 2-3 days in the office
  • 👶Enhanced family (parental) leave - gender-neutral policy, 12 weeks paid leave
  • 👪5 days Caretaker's leave
  • 😷Enhanced occupational sick pay
  • 💻£500 WFH budget
  • 📚All the learning resources and books you want to aid in your personal development
  • 🎉 Regular socials to unwind and have some fun