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 .

Forward Deployed Engineer

Take2 · New York

About Take2 AI

Take2 builds AI Interviewers that automate the entire screening process — reviewing resumes, conducting structured phone screens, and scheduling next steps.

Today, our customers are leading healthcare organizations. Every month, we help hospitals and health systems hire faster, reduce recruiting overhead, and fill critical clinical roles more quickly.

When healthcare organizations hire faster, patient care improves. Staffing gaps shrink. Burnout decreases. The ripple effects are real.

We already power thousands of candidate conversations each month. Now we’re scaling to millions — at a time when healthcare workforce infrastructure needs transformation.

About the Role

Take2 AI is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to design, launch, and continuously improve our AI Interviewers for customers. Our AI agents already conduct tens of thousands of structured candidate interviews each month.

This role sits at the intersection of voice/conversational agents, prompt + flow design, evaluation/scoring rubrics, and production iteration. You’ll work directly with customers to understand screening requirements, translate them into structured interviewer behavior, deploy agents into production, and improve performance based on real-world feedback and metrics.

This is a hands-on, highly analytical role for someone who enjoys turning ambiguous requirements into precise agent behavior, building rigorous evaluation approaches, and shipping improvements quickly in a startup environment.

What You’ll Do

Customer Onboarding & Requirements (Customer-Facing)

  • Lead technical onboarding with customers to understand roles, hiring goals, must-have signals, and constraints.

  • Translate customer needs into structured interview flows, role-specific question banks, and scoring rubrics.

  • Set clear expectations on what “good” looks like (pass/fail thresholds, evaluation rationale, interviewer tone and style).

Voice Agent Conversation Design (Prompts + Flows)

  • Design, build, and refine prompts and agent logic that drive interviewer behavior, question sequencing, probing, and candidate experience.

  • Ensure interviewer conversations are consistent, role-relevant, and robust to edge cases (evasive candidates, unclear answers, noisy audio, interruptions).

  • Implement multi-step structured interview flows with state management and guardrails.

Evaluation & Scoring Systems

  • Design and maintain AI-based evaluation and scoring aligned to customer rubrics and hiring criteria.

  • Improve accuracy, consistency, and explainability of scoring at scale (including calibration across roles/customers).

  • Identify bias/fairness risks and contribute to mitigation strategies and compliant evaluation practices.

Deployment, Iteration, and Customer Feedback Loops

  • Launch new customer interviewers into production and own iteration cycles from early rollout through steady-state performance.

  • Use customer feedback + production metrics to prioritize improvements and deliver measurable outcomes.

  • Communicate changes clearly to customers and internal stakeholders.

Quality, Reliability, and Scale

  • Build and own lightweight QA/evaluation pipelines to measure conversation quality, scoring accuracy, and reliability before/after changes.

  • Monitor production performance and partner with engineering to balance quality, latency, and cost tradeoffs.

  • Contribute to standards and best practices for prompt quality, eval quality, and voice-agent reliability.

In Terms of Experience

Required:

  • 2+ years working with LLMs, NLP systems, or AI agents in production.

  • Demonstrated experience designing and deploying agent workflows (prompts + structured flows) that operate at scale.

  • Strong understanding of prompt engineering, agent control, failure modes, and conversational edge cases.

  • Experience building or contributing to evaluation/testing/QA frameworks for AI systems.

  • Comfort being customer-facing: running technical discovery, translating requirements, and driving onboarding to production.

  • Strong analytical mindset (accuracy, consistency, bias, calibration, and edge cases).

Preferred:

  • Familiarity with voice/conversational AI systems, especially real-time or high-volume environments.

  • Strong Python skills (APIs, data pipelines, eval harnesses, testing frameworks).

  • Hands-on experience with multiple LLMs (GPT, Claude, Gemini, LLaMA/Mistral, fine-tuned models).

  • Experience designing multi-step agents with state management and structured outputs.

  • Experience operating AI systems in production and iterating based on real-world performance metrics.

  • Prior startup experience (high ownership, fast iteration, ambiguity).

  • Bachelor’s degree in CS/Engineering/Math or related technical field — or equivalent practical experience.

Location & Flexibility

We’re NYC-based and work hybrid (in-office Mon-Fri). We value in-person collaboration but also trust people to manage their time responsibly.

Compensation & Growth

Competitive salary + meaningful equity. This is a chance to join at a stage where your work meaningfully shapes the product and your career trajectory.