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 Infrastructure Engineer

Scrunch · Remote USA

About Scrunch

Scrunch, a venture-backed startup, is on a mission to bring brands to an AI-first future—where people increasingly rely on LLMs to discover, understand, and act on information that matters to them.

As AI search and conversational agents replace traditional web search and browsing, Scrunch helps marketing teams rethink how their products and services are discovered and surfaced on AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and more—working with AI platforms, not against them. This shift represents the biggest change to marketing since the dawn of the internet.

With $26M in backing from Mayfield Fund, Decibel, Homebrew, GTM Capital, and leading Silicon Valley founders and operators, Scrunch has scaled rapidly since commercial launch. Today, more than 500 paying brands—including Fortune 500 companies like Lenovo, category-defining brands like Skims, and breakout startups like Clerk—use the platform.

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Infrastructure Engineer to join our team. This is a high-ownership role responsible for designing, building, and operating the foundational systems that power Scrunch's platform – from cloud infrastructure and developer tooling all the way to observability and reliability. Infrastructure at Scrunch is business-critical: our customers depend on it, and you'll have real impact shaping how we scale.

Location Requirement:

  • This role is open to candidates located in and legally authorized to work in the US. Scrunch is a remote organization, but in-office or hybrid work is possible for candidates based in the NYC or Salt Lake City metro areas (and we love to jam in person from time to time!)

  • Applicants must reside in one of the following states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Missouri, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Texas, Utah

  • We are unable to hire outside of these states at this time.

What We're Looking For:

For this role, we'd like to see candidates that:

  • Have experience working in a high-velocity software development organization.

  • Have experience designing, building, and operating cloud services at scale, preferably on GCP.

  • Have deployed and operated edge compute functions, and understand when it makes sense to run logic at the edge versus further back in the stack.

  • Can treat infrastructure like software versioned, tested, and deployed through automation rather than one-off console clicks. Experience with Terraform or similar IaC tools is a plus.

  • Posses a solid understanding of database performance and scaling patterns, and have hands-on experience identifying bottlenecks and addressing them before they become outages.

  • Familiarity with workflow orchestration tools or job queue systems such as Prefect, Airflow, Temporal, Inngest, or similar, and are comfortable designing reliable, retryable async pipelines.

  • Have a strong foundation in building observable systems, including structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics dashboards, and alerting.

  • Are comfortable writing production-quality code (we mostly use python) and approach infrastructure work with a software engineering mindset.

Scrunch is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome people of all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and identities. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

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