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 .

Manager, Engineering

Smarsh · Atlanta

Who are we?

Smarsh empowers its customers to manage risk and unleash intelligence in their digital communications. Our growing community of over 6500 organizations in regulated industries counts on Smarsh every day to help them spot compliance, legal or reputational risks in 80+ communication channels before those risks become regulatory fines or headlines.  Relentless innovation has fueled our journey to consistent leadership recognition from analysts like Gartner and Forrester, and our sustained, aggressive growth has landed Smarsh in the annual Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing American companies since 2008.

Summary
 
We are seeking an experienced and highly capable Manager of Engineering to lead our US Server team. This role involves managing and mentoring a team of Java developers, while also providing strong technical leadership across system architecture, design, and implementation. You will guide the team in developing new product capabilities and enhancing existing ones across both our federal enclave environment and our AWS-based cloud production environment. This position includes dual responsibility across two major domains.  Leading, designing, and supporting capabilities within our federal enclave, including strict compliance requirements, secure development practices, and constrained deployment workflows. Driving cloud-native development in AWS, improving our services, reliability, scalability, and efficiency with modern DevOps practices and tooling. The ideal candidate is a strong technical leader, an excellent communicator, and someone who thrives in an Agile environment where mentorship, ownership, and collaboration are key.
 
Our tech stack includes Redis, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Spring, Microservices, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Jenkins, Grafana, ELK, Maven, and GitHub
Summary
 
We are seeking an experienced and highly capable Manager of Engineering to lead our US Server team. This role involves managing and mentoring a team of Java developers, while also providing strong technical leadership across system architecture, design, and implementation. You will guide the team in developing new product capabilities and enhancing existing ones across both our federal enclave environment and our AWS-based cloud production environment. This position includes dual responsibility across two major domains.  Leading, designing, and supporting capabilities within our federal enclave, including strict compliance requirements, secure development practices, and constrained deployment workflows. Driving cloud-native development in AWS, improving our services, reliability, scalability, and efficiency with modern DevOps practices and tooling. The ideal candidate is a strong technical leader, an excellent communicator, and someone who thrives in an Agile environment where mentorship, ownership, and collaboration are key.
 
Our tech stack includes Redis, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Spring, Microservices, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Jenkins, Grafana, ELK, Maven, and GitHub
About our culture

Smarsh hires lifelong learners with a passion for innovating with purpose, humility and humor. Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do. We work closely with the most popular communications platforms and the world’s leading cloud infrastructure platforms. We use the latest in AI/ML technology to help our customers break new ground at scale. We are a global organization that values diversity, and we believe that providing opportunities for everyone to be their authentic self is key to our success. Smarsh leadership, culture, and commitment to developing our people have all garnered Comparably.com Best Places to Work Awards. Come join us and find out what the best work of your career looks like.

How will you contribute?

  • Lead, mentor, and manage a team of Java developers, including hiring, coaching, performance reviews, and professional development.
  • Own technical design and architecture decisions across services deployed in both federal enclave and AWS cloud environments.
  • Guide team members in delivering high quality, secure, and scalable backend systems.
  • Promote engineering best practices, including code quality, system design, test coverage, DevOps, and security.
  • Collaborate closely with Product, DevOps, QA, and Security teams to ensure high quality and compliant releases.
  • Oversee production troubleshooting, root cause analysis, system tuning, and operational improvements.
  • Drive innovation, evaluate new tools and technologies, and continuously improve engineering processes.
  • Lead Agile ceremonies and ensure predictable, high quality delivery.

    • What will you bring?

  • 5+ years of hands-on experience in Java development, including strong expertise with Spring / Spring Boot.
  • 2+ years of experience leading a development team or providing significant technical leadership.
  • Strong understanding of OOP, Java internals, concurrency, and multi-threaded programming.
  • Proven experience in designing and implementing distributed backend systems and microservices.
  • Hands-on experience working within secure or federal enclave environments or similar highly restricted environments.
  • Practical experience with AWS cloud services and cloud-native architectures.
  • DevOps-oriented mindset, familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, observability, automation, Docker, and Kubernetes
  • Strong communication skills and ability to lead both people and technology.Experience with production environments, monitoring, metrics, and performance optimization.
  • Experience supporting FedRAMP-certified products.
  • Knowledge and hands-on experience with Kafka or other event-driven messaging systems.
  • Familiarity with Redis, Oracle, or PostgreSQL databases.
  • Experience with Jenkins, Grafana, ELK, GitHub Actions or similar tools.
  • Strong testing mindset (unit, component, integration).
  • Experience with large-scale microservices architectures.  
    • View full listing