There's a real lack of transparency that makes this look shady. How did you get your hands on these resumes? How do I know that these were actually successful resumes? Are the resume writers getting compensation for their work that you're selling?
They've set themselves up perfectly for their next product/service:
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!
The free database on the main site is pretty small so not many lines will show up. The pro database has tons more technical lines (as well as others). We'll be adding to both over the coming weeks - we've got a backlog of resumes so we have enough content for now. Thanks!
Hey, thanks for the question! 1) In our FAQ we explain that we have sourced the resumes from people in our network (this means colleagues we've worked with and students I went to B-school with for example). 2) We went through each of those resumes of candidates that were successful, and picked strong lines that were used in each. These lines all generally follow the same framework which we described in the Learn More page. 3) We absolutely got permission to post lines from the original resume writers behind a paywall, as long as no confidential elements were left in. This is why company names and project specifics were omitted. For confidentiality reasons, it is also why we have not included the company the resume line worked at next to each line. Thanks again for the question.
Having reviewed hundreds of job applications recently (for three completely different roles at my company), I would generally say candidates should focus on the cover letter / email. Most applicants won't even get their resumes read at all if their cover letter or emails aren't good.
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...
As a professional resume writer/editor, I appreciate your comments. Excellent advice. I would say however, there remains a considerable amount of debate about the CL, even in editing and/or hiring circles. I work out of Shanghai, China and although my global clients are individual job seekers and academic aspirants, I keep in close contact with some local Fortune 1000 colleagues. I have had many say to me they spend zero time on the CL and only scan the resume quickly. It behooves the writer, if at all possible, to find out from the employer if a CL is even worth it. Writers may spend valuable hours on something which is given no attention.
That sounds great. However, after helping my girlfriend to send hundreds of cover letters and resumes crafted for each and every position and all you get back is generic reply, e.g.
"Dear applicant, we are receiving a large amount of application. If we decide to invite you for an interview, you will hear back from us within 8 weeks." and that's it, I'm really questioning this strategy. It is so time consuming that it effectively reduces your chances just by sending low quantity of applications. I think you can't send more than 6-8 of those per day if you work on this full time and it gets quite depressing after a couple of months.
When intently looking for a job, I segment leads into three groups depending on how much I think I would enjoy the job. The first gets a generic cover letter and generic resume. The second gets a custom cover letter and generic resume. The third gets a custom cover letter and custom resume. Perhaps an approach like that would give the best of both approaches.
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.
Huh...interesting. I don't think I've ever sent anything except a URL to my resume, along with a very generic subject that might mention a specific job posting...or not.
Maybe that 'forces' the receiver to read my resume?
I don't know your geography, industry or role - but - as a hiring manager for developer roles - generically - if I have to plow through 200 applications to find 25 candidates to screen to find 10 interviewees to fill two positions in any given month, I would not read your resume.
I am not saying that your approach is a bad one, but I wouldn't be "forced" to read your resume.
The instructions at the end of my job postings are pretty clear: use email to send resume and cover letter in PDF or text, in your cover letter describe an interesting technical problem that you solved.
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?
Even without a cover letter, you need to write an email and attach your resume? If this email is being read by a person, then this email is therefore the most important thing to even get a chance of your resume being read.
Looks pretty. However for a service that claims to provide me the best words to put on my resume, the tagline "write impactful resumes" is rather harmful.
"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.
+1 to this. "Impactful" is not just clunky, it's corporate wankspeak. "Impacted" is bad enough -- only teeth, fractures and faeces can be impacted -- but that appears already to be a lost battle, unfortunately.
Thanks so much for the feedback! It's really funny because my partner and I jumped between 'effective' and 'impactful' for the main copy a couple of times! I'm curious to know what others on HN think? I'll make a round of changes this weekend and will update the headline.
It's a matter of audience. "Impactful" is a corporate buzzword neologism, so it turns some people off. But it will definitely attract the kind of people who leverage synergies to align their processes for the win-win-win. Who do you want using your site?
Agree that impactful jumped out as clunky (and I say this a corporate consultant). Also agree that effective is better, but still too non-specific. Maybe: "Write resumes that get interviews." Interviews are specific positive outcome directly tied to resume quality.
You're welcome! Didn't mean to sound like a jerk, but I run a service that helps copywriters and content-writers write better, so this kind of thing tends to jumps out at me.
>Led the transition to a paperless practice by implementing an electronic booking system and a faster, safer and more accurate business system. Reduced costs of labor by 30% and office overhead by 10%.
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!"
I hate this advice so much, even if it's true that it works.
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.
I'm engineer and I've had direct knowledge of how my work has impacted other departments. I don't even have to ask - sales or ops will just say "thanks to X project, we reduced touch time by 30%" at all hands or general meetings. I can't imagine working at a place that hides this info from either the engineers or most of the company.
Doesnt have to be about money. I reduced page load times by x%, measured it with the chrome inspector network tab and it was brought up in an interview.
You should always strive to measure the impact of your work. Always.
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.
And at the end of some successful two year project, having moved on to a new position at a new company, am I to call George back a few years later and ask for him to leak me info about my project's impact, assuming George still works there himself?
So by that point, I've already made like three things up because there's absolutely no way for them to fact check this nonsense. Why talk to George when I can just pull something out of my ass? "Yeah, the process totally saved a half hour every week, which is about $500 because BUSINESS. Good luck verifying that, asshole."
Wait, so you think that when you say "I made the process 13% more efficient and saved the company $12.5 million dollars" that they actually call the company to verify?
>>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.
This is a very standard format: Action, quantifiable result. Action, quantifiable result. I think one of the best edits one can make to their resume is to at least convert to that format.
"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!
There are ways you can show quantitative impact that's not necessarily financial. Examples include: time saved in terms of hours, reduction of support requests, etc.
Why does it have to be useless nonsense? It's about thinking about your work differently, and learning to tell the story of your career in a quantifiable way, rather than just qualitative.
I had a free resume evaluation thing done to my resume and this was what was suggested to me regarding "I did x, resulted in % effect" and I don't know how to calculate that as a task do-er person / working on a site that doesn't make money yet (but being paid by site owner to develop features).
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.
Regarding your first question, I think you’re looking at it too much from your own perspective. Take a look from the perspective of the site owner; what problems do you solve for him/her? What other value do you add to the site?
If say you added a capability to encrypt data (not SSL but static data storage encryption) and ability for multiple users. Without any users yet how do you qauntify that?
Doesn't search symbols. The example gives "Python" as a search term so I assumed you could look up languages. C/C++/C# all return the same thing, which incidentally have nothing to do with the programming language because it is just searching the letter 'c'.
These people weren't successful because of their resumes - they were successful in their past roles, which is effectively communicated on their resumes. Because of their past success, they were hired into a different better/more prestigious/more impactful role.
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
There are some good text snippets on the linked site, so if your strengths do not lie in written English then it could very well be a helpful resource for how to word things. However, beware the mentality that the only thing standing in the way of your dreams is the perfect one-page summary of your accomplishments to date. A resume is just a marketing document. Economy of prose and short declarative sentences are your friends. Keep it to one page in Times New Roman or Arial.
On the marketing document analogy, a service might reduce the overall effectiveness of these types of lines as a signal. Right now these lines are a differentiator not so much for their literal content but for the signaling that the person who uses one knows about how resume writing is advancing and is tapped into that. Sure, the content matters too but as hiring manager I can tell you these lines get similarly superficially scanned like the crappy vague lines do. That is, after reading the hundredth resume that day, the main takeaway is of the form "ah, this person knows about making their resume lines specific and concrete...+1...this other person doesn't...-1" Once everyone catches on, this signal becomes less useful.
There's still a bit of an acid test going on in that you understand the person has a) bothered to learn how to communicate business value and b) whether they are putting value-add to your organisation in front of their ego.
I make a few bucks here and there editing resumes, sometimes for surprisingly statusy people. If you are doing your own resume without help, check for typos and for formatting consistency. All dates should be the same format. Look for stray commas, periods, etc.
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.)
Lots of numbers in there. I know it's recommended to include them, but it seems a bit meaningless as some predictor for the future job fitness.
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.
If you're in a sales or marketing role where metrics matter, being able to dig out and present some sort of valid metric that sounds impressive (even if your time in that role really wasn't that great) is a minimum requirement to get in the door; the FizzBuzz test in CV form. There are a lot of metrics to choose from even when if many of them - quite possibly for reasons outside your control - are negative numbers
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....
Thanks for that comment. Specifically on your last line, I totally agree. The site is meant to help people better word their resumes and even get ideas to describe a boring work experience in a more effective way.
Never use this if you’re applying in Germany or other European countries unless it’s an American company. Most companies hate exactly this kind of lines and they will ignore your CV
Disagree if you are going for anything senior in consulting. This stuff only sounds like meaningless buzzwords if you don't speak the language, just as all Swedish sounds to me like the Swedish chef muppet. We could similarly lol at the vagaries of techspeak or any other expert domain language with its portmanteaus and abbreviations. Non-wannabe users of this business type of language expect every word to be up for challenge and defendable, and are actually using it for concision not empty wordiness. Having said that, any expert argot does of course narrow your audience which may be undesirable and demonstrate poor communication skills (though sometimes you want to do precisely this and show you are a peer).
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.
> Most [EU] companies hate exactly this kind of lines and they will ignore your CV
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.
Try and do that with a truly German company. I do agree that things changed, but they definitively prefer a modest "lebenslauf" (just a list of your studies and previous positions, basically) to a self-centered American-style CV.
I'm not saying it's better, it's just a different approach.
Disagree again, especially in Germany US-style CVs with focus on achievements and accomplishments are learned, appreciated and have a much higher conversion than descpriptive CVs.
Because it smells from 10 kilometres away like bullshit only management/sales people would dare to write?
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.
Haha yes, that's exactly what we did. Though we went through another internal iteration of selecting lines amongst all those resumes that we found effective. For context, we've reviewed about 600 resumes so far and only picked around 300 lines. More will be added to both the main page (free content) and the paid page.
I have my doubts. The website does try to associate itself with these companies but some of the lines look like they are referencing side projects or very small startups.
> 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
Hey! Thanks for the feedback. It is acceptable and in fact completely recommended to include side projects and small startups on your resume. Based on my review of 500+ successful resumes, I've found that many candidates use their side projects and part time consulting gigs to showcase skillsets outside their full time job.
I totally agree the product isn't for everyone. I have a number of friends who regularly source a number of example lines from LinkedIn and their friends when they want to update their resume. Some people will continue to do just that while some people would prefer to pay for the convenience of all lines being shown to the user in one place. Thanks for the feedback!
Same here, I am always retooling my profile. There is definitly a market for that but it might be a less for a tech oriented crowd. You could also think about a similar project about job titles and the demands / qulifications that similar companies listed in the past for that, i.e. if I want to become the CIO of a mid-size manufacturing firm, what qualifications did similar firms request in the past and how were they wording it. I would encourage you to be more creative with your pricing because currently I would not be subscribing. Something like a high one time fee (for those that have some sort of urgency ($29 for 1 month)) and a really low per month fee ($2.45 per month for 12 month).
I think this service combined with a review services would be an even greater market. I've not had much luck with professional reviewers, though I've admittedly not used anyone local or expensive. I usually get vague feedback from online reviewers with basic hints (like, "You need to use less action words and more accomplishment words") so a service like this would give me the ideas the reviewer didn't. I've already found a couple of ideas in the free section.
Hey thanks for the feedback! Glad you found some ideas in the free section. I think a complete resume review is a natural next step for the product - we have people in our network who are willing to do complete resume reviews.
Hey thanks for the question! Yes, the hope is that people use this solely for inspiration. Many people work well with examples and these are the users we are trying to help. On the Learn More page, we've put in a disclaimer at the end: Please refrain from using any line word for word on your resume. Tweak and edit the line to suit your experience, instead of directly plagiarising it. Do not outright lie on your resume. It may be tempting to find a really powerful line on this site and use it as is on your resume, even if it does not reflect your true experience. Please do not do this.
In a seminar on hiring, engineers were surprised when I highlighted that in CVs one should mention numbers whereever possible: https://youtu.be/5hsTnTeZk-k?t=1013
(btw. Europeans are much worse at "selling" themselves / using numbers compared to their North American counterparts)
This must be very popular in USA. It seems that there, people really like the idea of a hero, totally ignoring that a bellow average team can do much better than a hero can. If I would receive any CVs with such lines it would have a really good change of ending up in the "Liars" bin.
Individually they are. As a group they can deliver if they are a real team. Just look at the German soccer team. You could not mention a star on that team but they won 2014 FIFA World Cup.
I entered a search term for a programming language and got a bunch of lines to "copy" that seemed to be for accounting or sales, not tech.
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.
Hey! The solution is to add more lines which we'll be adding to the Free site. The Pro site has several hundred lines so the search works much better. Thanks for the feedback.
I never understood what's the point of having quantifiable data in a resume for a software engineer.
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.
Unfortunately, it's what recruiters look for and it's necessary in today's job market. There are other ways you can quantify a line that isn't financial - e.g. time saved, improved algorithm complexity, reduction of support queries, etc.
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.
Nope, you aren't doing anything wrong. The search results should update after every letter you type. I'll look into why it isn't working on Firefox/Edge. Thanks for the feedback!
Some A/B testing might be needed, but my gut feeling is that this should be a flat fee service (lifetime).
- 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)
Some great points here, thank you! We've rightly got a lot of feedback on the pricing. We'll work on coming up with a better pricing model - thanks again.
