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 Site Reliability Engineer

Rootly · Toronto, Ontario, Canada (Hybrid)

About Rootly

At Rootly, we are on a mission to be the go-to way companies respond when things go wrong, helping every organization be more reliable. We do this by building an industry-leading incident management platform that allows companies around the world consistently and quickly resolve incidents. We are not simply transforming an industry, we are carving an entirely new +$B segment ourselves and need incredible talent to achieve this ambitious goal together.

Customers love Rootly. Some of the fastest growing companies around the world such as NVIDIA, Figma, Canva, Tripadvisor, Squarespace and more rely on Rootly to power their critical incident management process. They obsess over our delightful enterprise-ready platform and unique partnership model. See why our customers have reviewed us 5 stars on G2.

Investors love Rootly. We are backed by some of the most respected funds in the world from Y Combinator to operators like the CTO of Dropbox and GitHub. We'd be happy to disclose our entire funding and profitability picture live during the interview. As a culture we relentlessly put transparency first. We conduct monthly financial reviews as a team so everyone has a pulse on the health of the business and publish what we are building in our weekly changelog.

About the Role

This is an opportunity to join Rootly as an early SRE leader and shape our technical foundation. You will experience the balance of being scrappy and operating at scale. What you’ll be doing one day could look very different the next. You will be empowered to identify opportunities that will help us grow and own it. In short, this role is designed for individuals that crave ownership, stimulating technical challenges, love shipping fast, and are mission driven. We won’t sugarcoat it, the work will be challenging, but it will also be one of the most rewarding learning experiences of your career.

  • Embed with product teams to enhance observability, reliability, and performance of their services.
  • Own our CI/CD pipelines, observability tooling, monitoring systems, and incident response processes.
  • Build tools and automation to eliminate manual toil, improve engineering velocity and developer experience, and improve system reliability.
  • Collaborate deeply across engineering to understand systems at the code level and surface cross-cutting reliability, performance, and scaling concerns.
  • Architect and scale our infrastructure, ensuring best-in-class performance, availability, and operational excellence.
  • Drive capacity planning efforts to ensure our infrastructure is resilient and scalable as we grow.
  • Define and manage SLOs and error budgets in partnership with Engineering teams who own production services.
  • Be vocal - act as a strong voice and force of reliability, quality, performance, and scalability.

About You'll Need:

Minimum Qualifications

  • 5+ years of experience in an SRE, Platform, or Infrastructure Engineering role.
  • 5+ years of experience writing software in a production environment.
  • Strong technical knowledge of cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and reliability practices.
  • Strong understanding of observability, performance tuning, and scaling strategies.
  • Deep familiarity with incident response, monitoring, and CI/CD systems.
  • Hands-on experience supporting web or RPC services at meaningful scale.
  • You write code to solve infrastructure problems; not shell scripts alone, but production-grade software.

Preferred Qualifications

  • You have a big-picture systems mindset and a proactive approach to reliability.
  • You’ve embedded with product teams and influenced design and architecture decisions.
  • You’re comfortable taking ownership of complex problems—and seeing them through.
  • Experience with Ruby and Go is a plus.

Why Rootly?

We’re not just another startup. We’re building something category-defining and want teammates who crave ownership, love solving hard problems, and thrive in a high-bar, high-impact environment.

Here’s what you can expect when you join Rootly:

  • Competitive compensation and early equity in a fast-growing, venture-backed company.
  • Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
  • 3 weeks of vacation, plus unlimited sick and mental health days, and a company-wide end-of-year shutdown to recharge.
  • $500 stipend for home office setup.
  • A fast-moving, high-impact environment where your leadership and ideas directly shape the future of the company.

If this sounds like the kind of challenge and opportunity you’re looking for, apply now and let’s build something great together.


Rootly is an equal opportunity employer. We aim to create an environment where every team member at Rootly feels like they belong so they can have a greater impact on our business and customers. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.