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!
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.
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?
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?
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.
>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.
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!
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
[+] [-] taco_emoji|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blackkettle|8 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] msky|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rohanm93|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gingerlime|8 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] vfulco|8 years ago|reply
Enjoying the discussion here.
Vince Fulco, CFA, CAIA vfulco[@]weisisheng.cn
[+] [-] egman_ekki|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Diederich|8 years ago|reply
Maybe that 'forces' the receiver to read my resume?
[+] [-] mikebenfield|8 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] m52go|8 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] fnordprefect|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rohanm93|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] komali2|8 years ago|reply
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!"
[+] [-] sdiupIGPWEfh|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ryandrake|8 years ago|reply
"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!
[+] [-] jcun4128|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] godelski|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rohanm93|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] headhunter|8 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] PerryCox|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghostbrainalpha|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leroy_masochist|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bayonetz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrleinad|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godelski|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goodroot|8 years ago|reply
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'.
[+] [-] Mz|8 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] megous|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] notahacker|8 years ago|reply
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....
[+] [-] camillomiller|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dreamfactored|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lr4444lr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] earlybike|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cbcoutinho|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpcx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KhalPanda|8 years ago|reply
e.g. SWE at Google - "these résumé lines must be good!"
[+] [-] exception_e|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rohanm93|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arkitaip|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rohanm93|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mead5432|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FLUX-YOU|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s3nnyy|8 years ago|reply
(btw. Europeans are much worse at "selling" themselves / using numbers compared to their North American counterparts)
[+] [-] rohanm93|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jansho|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rohanm93|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GoToRO|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kiro|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply