Show HN: Resume Worded – Write impactful resumes
resumeworded.com
resumeworded.com
ResumeDetected: detect resume plagiarism; our solution goes beyond verbatim phrase matching and identifies risky and dishonest behavior using our state-of-the-art proprietary deep-learning systems and one-of-a-kind annotated corpus of real world resumes.
Pay to get the clever phrases. Pay to see who paid to get the clever phrases. Pay more to obfuscate your data from those who paid to see if you paid to get them!
I was quite shocked how many emails and cover letters from candidates were 100% generic, had spelling mistakes, highlighted irrelevant skills, didn't respond to basic questions on the job ad etc.
My top tips would be (in this order):
* READ the job ad carefully.
* Write an email / cover letter that 1) shows that you've read it. 2) is specific to both the company and the role you're applying for. and 3) answers all requirements on the job ad.
* Try to focus on what makes you a good candidate for the role and company. The focus should not be on your skills however, it should be on the required skills that the company needs, and how you could fit.
* Read the job ad again :)
* If possible, adapt the resume as well to highlight those areas of good-fit. Or at least highlight them on the cover letter/email, so the person reviewing your application would even be interested to read your resume...
Enjoying the discussion here.
Vince Fulco, CFA, CAIA vfulco[@]weisisheng.cn
I think that even one quick sentence or a few tweaks to make the application look more personalized, can go a long way to getting on top of the list though. e.g. something as simple as "I love what you guys are doing at <company name>" / "It seems like a great place to work with like-minded people at <company name> on <project name mentioned on the job ad>"... not to mention simple formatting, avoiding typos and spelling errors etc :)
And of course, even if you write the best resume or cover letter, there are others who would do the same, and perhaps are better qualified. Or did an even better job at it... Sadly, we also had to reject candidates who spent time writing good cover letters and had good resumes. You can only shortlist as many people, and some are bound to get rejected however great they may be.
Maybe that 'forces' the receiver to read my resume?
I am not saying that your approach is a bad one, but I wouldn't be "forced" to read your resume.
I am in the SF Bay area, and I do (and have been doing what is now called) "devops".
The cover letter is a writing sample: I want to see how well you communicate in written English with a presumably limited time budget. Lots of documentation gets written that way; it's directly relevant. Deeper than that, what people think is interesting - or technical - is a clue as to their overall technical depth.
Getting the resume in .docx means that they aren't so great at details.
> Getting the resume in .docx means that they aren't so great at details.
:) I also discovered this to be true even when we didn't require the resume to be PDF formatted on the ad.
And a fantastic point about testing your writing skills as early as the initial email (and with a limited time for each job application, but fairly high stakes). Couldn't agree more.
It's very difficult to synthesize all the resume advice one receives though. I've actually been told more than once not to spend any time on the cover letter because no one will read it, and that in fact if I include a detailed cover letter I may look clueless.
And, honestly, it is a little hard to understand the point. Aren't I supposed to customize my resume itself to each role, and use it to show how I'm a good fit? What exactly is the purpose of duplicating all that in a second document?
"Impactful" is clunky. "Effective" is what you want. But neither word offers a specific pay-off, which is what you actually want in both a head-line on a site and a bullet-point on a resume.
Best of luck!
Just looking at the first example, this nails the head for me as an ex-recruiter about the best way to write a resume tagline. You didn't "use simplybookly.me," you "(action verb)implemented a (description of thing) booking system that (result in hard numbers) reduced costs of labor by 30%.
Be ready to answer on how you calculated that number, but when you are inevitably asked and come out with an actual method (please god don't lie) it'll be all the more impressive. "Holy shit, this person actually had a good way to measure cost of labor and sought to reduce it numerically!"
How many people actually have any sort of knowledge of (or access to) such measurements? If you're in sales or management, great, but the bulk of the workforce, especially those who desperately need their next resume to land them a half-decent job fast, are not in such positions.
Even as a developer, I've had exactly one gig where I had access to quantifiable results. Customer X was losing $Y per week, and when I provided a solution plugging problem Z... well, that's that. Some customers and employers are rather cagey about leaking finance data. Even if they were wide open about my impact, I'd have to stick around a few extra years to see the result.
And if you can't measure it, you should ask your users for ballpark estimates. "Hey George, how many minutes a day does the new feature I added save you?" From there you can convert it to an estimated average financial impact fairly easily.
>>Why talk to George when I can just pull something out of my ass?
Because lying is bad? I mean when you talk to George you are at least making a good faith effort to come up with a realistic estimate (which you would be honest in your resume by using words like "approximately" for instance). That's preferable if you have no other way to calculate the business impact of your work.
"Responsible for C++ implementation of WhizBang Product's codebase" = ???
"Implemented BarFoo feature resulting in an additional $50M in revenue and 3 industry awards" = ahh, here's something this person can do for me!
Turns out the bean counters care about beans.
You also mentioned the how to calculate part which may imply having access to the site owner's data (however that may be, ask them) but I think it's hard to calculate those figures/don't know how to.
You probably have to wait too to see how your changes have impacted their site, by changing a CTA button color to "blue" and then you say "In 2 weeks, we noticed 150% growth in conversions" or something.
Step 1 of having a good resume: be a good employee
Step 2 of having a good resume: effectively communicate how/why you are a good employee
Many lovely candidates came to us because of the process. One of them laughed at resumes as being a form of ritualized lying.
Neat project, but I shrug my shoulders at 'the resume'.
This is one of the single biggest things I do. I sometimes spend far more time on reformatting such things than on rewording anything.
(Pro tip: Try reading it backwards. Humans are really bad about mentally filling in what they meant to say instead of seeing what they actually wrote when reading through their own work.)
If someone doubles user acquisition in previous company, it may mean a lot of things. Self reporting and attribution issues aside, it may simply mean that there was a really low hanging fruit at previous company when it came to marketing, or whatever.
The "proof of job fitness" comes when you describe how you doubled user acquisition in the actual interview. The person that can elaborate on how and why their ideas increased conversions by 10% and how the testing regime worked for it and how many hours work that represented for how much return is always going to win out over the person who says "yeah, we launched an upgrade and I sent out the emails announcing it and it increased sales by 200%"
On both counts, if you're using the linked website for anything more than getting a handle on how long your bullet points should be and whether jargon might be acceptable or not, you shouldn't be getting the job....
What is alienating to Europeans is pushier approach and assumed familiarity in US-style cold sales, in B2B particularly. And also hidden assumptions of the MBA set (e.g. grow fast and cash out, and shareholder value being the sole true purpose of being in business) - those need to be made explicit and don't always align to company missions.
Disagree. Finally it depends on the content your actual achievements but the wording is totally fine + learned. Most EU companies shouldn't have any problems with this style.
Truth is, most technical projects are failures or are thrashed for other reasons. So if everyone starts claiming a series of well-determined successes, then in all likeliness they are lying.
e.g. SWE at Google - "these résumé lines must be good!"
> Doubled new user acquisition from 10-15 users to 20-25 through the implementation of new marketing strategies focused on online advertising and improving the company's web presence, social media, and search engine optimization.
> Identified steps to reduce return rates by 10% resulting in an eventual $75k cost savings
> Designed and implemented 50+ E2E tests using Selenium & Protractor, simulating each user group's actions
(btw. Europeans are much worse at "selling" themselves / using numbers compared to their North American counterparts)
I don't understand what you mean by that. Sounds like a paradox. If they do better than a hero, then they're not below average.
So, either that's the secret to getting placed in good development positions -- to show that actually you are something else -- or, this site is Doing it Wrong.
Most of the time it'll likely end up being made up, as you don't have access to financial data and cannot estimate an impact your work had on a business.
After a cursory look through several of the top lines in different industries, it looks like your system strongly favors highly specified descriptions combined with positive numerical growth. For example:
Decreased uninstallation rate by 40% by introducing an interactive tutorial at app launch (Product Management)
Analyzed industry trends in the automobile sector and presented long and short equity investment ideas for 12 large-cap stocks that outperformed the Bloomberg sector benchmark by 7% in 2014. (Trading)
In other less common cases, it looks like your system selects underspecified lines, like the following:
Created a DCF valuation model to analyze a potential IPO of a major technology startup in New York (Quantitative Analysis)
...which is interesting to me, because that suggests this is happening manually right now. So your database is strongly predisposed to be an aid in candidate searches optimized for specific metrics (like trading, management and data science). On the other hand, your system is probably not all that helpful for things like technical information security, where metrics are much more difficult to judge and specify.
I'm interested in how you're doing this, because companies like LinkedIn are obviously very defensive against people crawling their resumes. But to do this more efficiently (and I'd say accurately too), you'd probably want to have a crawler manually weighted towards the top n companies in each target industry, with an NLP system recognizing the salient points of employees' resumes who work at those companies. Is that something you're working on or plan to work on, or are you going to do the resume and line curation manually?
As another point, I'd challenge your priors a bit. I don't know that you have a strong value proposition with just lines and no other specific context. What might be more helpful is the following:
1. Find a way to add the structural context of the resume instead of just salient lines: did this line appear under a job description? Was it under an accomplishments heading?
2. What if, instead of the most impressive lines, you develop this out to analyze the entire resume as a product? For example, collect as many resumes as you can, break these out into a universe of features, then produce statistics and visualizations on how close a resume is to optimal for a particular company. "88% of engineers at Google have this length, with these headings, etc".
Optimize the long tail of metrics that can be quickly changed for applicants, not the high impact permanent ones (like how long they've been at each job, which university they attended, etc).
3. Are you sure you want to target this product directly to applicants? If you develop this out into an effective data analytics product for how optimal a resume is for a specific company or likely it is to receive an interview, you could produce something targeted for recruiters that is worth a lot more.
In my opinion, this is a great first step, but you could be building a novel approach to recruiting here, targeted towards recruiters and companies instead of candidates.
Or am I doing something wrong? I type a keyword in there, but there is no search button, the list doesn't change after pressing enter.
I'm guessing that most people who use this service would pay for a month, gussy-up their resume, then stop using it.
That said, I'm with you with not wanting to pay for something like this.
- I think very few people will want to pay for 3 months of the service. I don't get continuing value from building a resume, and I will know in the very first few weeks if it's working. If after using the service I don't get companies trying to talk with me, I will be unhappy with the service.
- There's no point in continuing to pay for the service after I am hired. And my consumer spider-sense tingle every time I see "$/month", because I know somewhere on the checkout page there will be something like "cancel before 30 days otherwise we will charge". Seems shady practice for a service that has no value after I am hired. I will be thinking something like "why do they want to keep charging me if I got a job?"
Also, really, how many times do people look for jobs? They might update their resume every once in a while, but actively look? Every few years? Then why pay for something monthly?
Now, if this was a flat fee (even $25), I think more people would sign up, which might offset the "losses" of subscription (my point being there's no compelling reason to subscribe in the first place)