ATS Scanner Development Roadmap

Introduction

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) automates the screening of resumes by parsing the text and extracting structured
dataresources.workable.com. In practice, such systems identify key information (names, job titles, education, skills)
and match candidates to job requirements, greatly speeding up recruitmentresources.workable.comijarcce.com. NLP-
based resume analyzers can extract contact details, work history, and specialized skillsanalyticsvidhya.com. Some
advanced ATS tools even suggest improvements (e.g. missing skills or certifications) to help candidates refine their
profilesijarcce.com. This 4-week roadmap shows how to build a Python ATS scanner that parses PDF/DOCX/TXT
resumes, extracts features, and ranks candidates against job descriptions, using libraries like spaCy, scikit-learn, and
HuggingFace transformers.

Week 1: Environment Setup and Resume Parsing

 Learning Objectives: Set up the Python development environment; learn document parsing and basic NLP.
Understand resume structure and how an ATS reads itresources.workable.comanalyticsvidhya.com.

 Tools/Technologies: Python libraries for PDF and Word parsing (e.g. PyPDF2 or PDFMiner for PDFs, python-
docx for DOCX), regular expressions, spaCy and NLTK for text processing.

 Resources/Tutorials: SpaCy tutorials and documentation; Analytics Vidhya guide on resume

parsinganalyticsvidhya.com; PDFMiner and python-docx documentation; sample Kaggle resume datasets.

 Development Tasks: Implement code to extract raw text from sample resumes (PDF/DOCX). Clean and
normalize the text (remove headers/footers, whitespace). Use spaCy (or regex) to extract personal
information (name, email, phone) and standard sections (Education, Experience). Experiment with an open-
source parser like PyResparser for reference. Verify extraction on diverse resume formats and assemble an
initial set of example resumes and matching job descriptions for testing.

Week 2: Feature Extraction and Data Preprocessing

 Learning Objectives: Extract structured features (skills, education, experience) from parsed text; build a text
preprocessing pipeline.

 Tools/Technologies: spaCy (custom NER, PhraseMatcher), NLTK (tokenization, stopword removal), pandas
(data handling), regular expressions.

 Resources/Tutorials: SpaCy documentation (NER, matchers); blogs on resume NER and skill extraction; open-
source skill/job title vocabularies (e.g. O*NET skills database).

 Development Tasks: Develop functions to identify and normalize skills (using spaCy’s PhraseMatcher or a
curated keyword list). Detect education degrees and job titles via patterns or Named Entity Recognition. Use
spaCy to tag organizations and dates. Structure the extracted data into JSON or a database format.
Preprocess job descriptions similarly (tokenize, lowercase, remove stopwords) for consistency.

Week 3: Resume–Job Matching and Scoring

 Learning Objectives: Represent resumes and job descriptions as numeric vectors; compute similarity and
scoring; rank candidates.

 Tools/Technologies: scikit-learn (TfidfVectorizer, cosine_similarity), pretrained embeddings (spaCy word

vectors or HuggingFace transformer models like BERT/Sentence-BERT), NumPy.

 Resources/Tutorials: Guide on matching resumes to job descriptions using TF-IDF and

BERTkartikmadan11.medium.comkartikmadan11.medium.com; research on BERT for resume screening and
rankingijarcce.com.

 Development Tasks: Use TF-IDF to vectorize resumes and job descriptions and compute cosine similarity for
matchingkartikmadan11.medium.com. Experiment with transformer-based embeddings (e.g. Sentence-BERT)
 for context-aware similaritykartikmadan11.medium.com. Design a scoring rubric (e.g. a match percentage or
weighted score emphasizing skills match). Rank candidates by score for each job description. Evaluate the
model on a labeled test set, calculating precision, recall and F1-score to gauge
effectivenesskartikmadan11.medium.com.

Week 4: Integration, Testing, and Deployment

 Learning Objectives: Integrate all modules into an end-to-end system; create a user interface; finalize testing
and deployment.

 Tools/Technologies: Flask or Streamlit (for a simple web UI), Docker (for containerization), Git/GitHub
(version control), cloud platforms (AWS, Heroku) for deployment.

 Resources/Tutorials: Example open-source ATS projects (e.g. ResumeMatcher on GitHub) for reference;
Flask/Streamlit tutorials; guides on deploying Python apps with Docker and
AWS/Herokukartikmadan11.medium.com.

 Development Tasks: Combine the parsing and matching components into a single application. Build a UI that
lets users upload a resume and optionally input a job descriptionhuggingface.co. Display the resulting match
score and highlight missing keywords or skills. Thoroughly test the pipeline with various resumes and job
descriptions to refine performance. Finally, containerize the app (Docker) and deploy it on a cloud service
(e.g. AWS, Heroku)kartikmadan11.medium.com. Provide documentation and usage instructions.

Datasets and Evaluation

 Datasets: Utilize publicly available resume datasets (e.g. Kaggle’s resume-job collections) and job
descriptions (from sources like O*NET or scraped job boards). If needed, create synthetic resume–job pairs to
augment training/testing data.

 Evaluation: Measure extraction accuracy (precision/recall of identified skills/entities) and matching quality
(F1-score for correctly ranked candidates). Use ranking metrics (e.g. Mean Reciprocal Rank, top-k accuracy)
to evaluate candidate ordering. Compare baseline TF-IDF results against transformer-based models to assess
improvementskartikmadan11.medium.com.

References

 Workable (2023) – “What is resume parsing and how an applicant tracking system (ATS) reads a
resume”resources.workable.com.

 IJARCCE (2024) – “NLP-Based Resume Screening and Job Recruitment” (resume screening with keyword
matching and BERT)ijarcce.comijarcce.com.

 Analytics Vidhya (2023) – “The Resume Parser for Extracting Information with SpaCy’s
Magic”analyticsvidhya.com.

 Madan, K. (2024) – “Building a Job Description to Resume Matcher: TF-IDF, word2vec, and
BERT”kartikmadan11.medium.comkartikmadan11.medium.comkartikmadan11.medium.com.

 Wangikar, G. (2024) – “Resume ATS Analyzer” (example Gradio app)huggingface.co.

 spaCy Documentation – Features of spaCy for NLP pipelinesspacy.io.

Download the detailed roadmap as a Word document: ATS_Scanner_Roadmap.d