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 software engineer, product

Watershed · Mexico City

About Watershed

Watershed is the enterprise sustainability platform. Companies like Airbnb, Carlyle Group, FedEx, Visa, and Dr. Martens use Watershed to manage climate and ESG data, produce audit-ready metrics for voluntary and regulatory reporting including CSRD, and drive real decarbonization. We are looking for team members who love product-building, want to work hard at a mission-oriented startup, and will collaborate with us in shaping the culture of a growing team.

We have offices in San Francisco, New York, Denver, London, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, Mexico City, and remote team members across the US and Europe. We hope that you'll be interested in joining us!

The role

Do you love to build great technology and great teams? Watershed is scaling a world-class engineering team, and as part of this we are starting an office in Mexico City and looking for our founding Engineering Technical Lead. This is an opportunity to both bootstrap a team and set the culture for an entire office. 

The Tech Lead for our Engineering teams is a seasoned engineer who is responsible for guiding the team’s technical vision, ensuring it’s aligned with other teams’ product surface areas, and upholding the technical and operational bar for their team. Hands-on coding is an important part of the job. 

You will report to the CDMX founding Engineering Manager and work with them as well as Engineering leadership and Watershed’s co-founders to set the new team up for success in Mexico City. We already have successful engineering teams distributed across our offices in San Francisco, New York City, and London.

In this role, you will:

  • Be the Tech Lead of a co-located team of 4-8 engineers who will own our Supply Chain product module.

  • Be the thought partner for team’s Engineering Manager, Product Manager, and Designer to drive the team’s product and architecture vision

  • Partner with peer tech leads and domain experts in the US and UK to align standards, roadmaps and execution. Participate in our Technical Lead forum to steward our architecture and accelerate our velocity

  • Be a hands-on partner and mentor for your fellow engineers who have been tasked with leading design and implementation of a specific feature or project.

  • Lead by example by writing performant, well-crafted, tested, and maintainable code across our technical stack

  • Foster a culture of technical excellence and efficient execution within your team

You might be a good fit if you have:

  • 6+ yrs of experience building products with Javascript/Typescript or a similar language like C#

  • Strong full-stack development skills

  • 2+ years of experience leading teams or projects

  • Experience building enterprise products and understanding the quality and level of service expectations of enterprise customers 

  • Experience working in a multi-national distributed engineering organization 

  • Experience building with any of the following a plus:

    • Data-centric applications and Python

    • Continuous deployment 

    • GCP, Postgres, Temporal, and DuckDB

This position is required to be in person in our Mexico City office.

Must be willing to work from an office 4 days per week (except for remote roles)

Watershed has hub offices in San Francisco, New York, London, and Mexico City and satellite offices in Denver, Sydney, Paris, and Berlin. Where we have offices, employees are expected to be in office for 4 days per week. Certain jobs are open to being remote and will be specifically noted on the jobs page and in the job description if so.

What’s the interview process like?

It starts the same for every candidate: getting to know the team members through 1 to 2 conversations about Watershed, your experience, and your interests. Next steps can vary by role, but usual next steps are a skill or experience interview (e.g. a coding interview for an engineer, a portfolio review for a designer, deeper experience call for other roles) which leads to a virtual or in person interview panel. We prioritize transparency and lack of surprise throughout the process.

What if I need accommodations for my interview?

At Watershed, we are dedicated to ensuring an inclusive recruitment process. We provide reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities, long-term conditions, mental health needs, religious observances, neurodivergence, or pregnancy-related support requirements. If you need assistance during your process, please contact your recruiter.

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