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Show HN: Resume Worded – Write impactful resumes
- arkitaip 9y agoSince no one else can use these lines, I guess they are only useful as an inspiration?
- rohanm93 9y agoHey 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.
- dpcx 9y agoHow are these resume lines "proven?"
- KhalPanda 9y agoAt a guess, they're gleaned en-masse from the résumés of those working at 'prestigious' companies. e.g. SWE at Google - "these résumé lines must be good!"
- LoSboccacc 9y agoThey make you pay for that? Interesting, there’s a market for everything.
- noitsnot 9y agoI don't think there is much of a market for lines, maybe a complete review, though.
- rohanm93 9y agoI 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!
- 1337biz 9y agoSame 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).
- rohanm93 9y agoThanks for the feedback! The pricing is something a lot of people have asked about so I will review it in the coming month.
- rigormortiz 9y agoI 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.
- rohanm93 9y agoHey 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.
- rohanm93 9y agoHaha 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.
- old_relic_ 9y agoI 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
- rohanm93 9y agoHey! 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.
- leroy_masochist 9y agoThere 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.
- bayonetz 9y agoOn 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.
- dreamfactored 9y agoThere'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.
- adtac 9y agoHow were these resumes sourced?
- sgwae 9y agopost job offers with no real job.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoThen how can you determine which lines were most effective if those lines didn't result in anyone actually being hired?
- satanic_pope 9y ago^ Sharp rebuttal that.
- mead5432 9y agoNoticed that many of them actually have measurable impacts to them. Though, I will say that "copy" seems a bit strange to me in this context.
- godelski 9y agoDoesn'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'.
- rohanm93 9y agoGreat point - thanks for that. I'll fix that this weekend.
- revmoo 9y agoI did a search and the only result was: The remaining lines are only available to Pro users. Learn about Pro here. Hackernews is not your free-for-all advertising platform. Get fucked.
- megous 9y agoLots 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.
- notahacker 9y agoIf 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....
- rohanm93 9y agoThanks 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.
- bharris62 9y agokinda cool, no where worth 25 dollars/month. myperfectresume has a bunch of lines to, and its free to get inspiration from theres....
- MikeTheGreat 9y agoTo be fair, it's not really $25/month, it's a single month of the service for $25 (with a discount if you want to commit up front for longer). I'm guessing that most people who use this service would pay for a month, gussy-up their resume, then stop using it. That said, I'm with you with not wanting to pay for something like this.
- inerte 9y agoSome A/B testing might be needed, but my gut feeling is that this should be a flat fee service (lifetime). - I think very few people will want to pay for 3 months of the service. I don't get continuing value from building a resume, and I will know in the very first few weeks if it's working. If after using the service I don't get companies trying to talk with me, I will be unhappy with the service. - There's no point in continuing to pay for the service after I am hired. And my consumer spider-sense tingle every time I see "$/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)
- rohanm93 9y agoSome 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.
- m52go 9y agoLooks 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.
- rohanm93 9y agoThanks 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.
- webignition 9y agoI agree that "impactful" sounds clunky.
- sevensor 9y agoIt'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?
- ant6n 9y agoThe win-win-winners!
- m52go 9y agoYou'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. Best of luck!
- rohanm93 9y agoThanks again! I've actually updated the main headline to 'effective' :)
- Animats 9y agoThen at the receiving end, the machine learning system that reads the resumes recognizes these lines and does - what?
- taco_emoji 9y agoThere'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?
- msky 9y agoI started testing topics and the lack of technical resumes actually made me wonder - how will they continue to get more?
- rohanm93 9y agoThe 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!
- blackkettle 9y agoThey'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!
- rohanm93 9y agoHey, 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.
- mrleinad 9y agoGreat. Now I can scrape all these quotes, build random resumes with them, and do some A/B testing with recruiters.
- godelski 9y agoI would actually love to see how this turns out. Kind of like this https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/ https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/
- paultopia 9y agoSeriously. Or maybe even use some kind of generative model to combine this gobledygook with one's own resume, like the corporate-ese equivalent of this thing. https://www.boredpanda.com/computer-deep-learning-algorithm-painting-masters/ https://www.boredpanda.com/computer-deep-learning-algorithm-...
- hellofunk 9y agoI 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.
- rohanm93 9y agoHey! 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.
- dsacco 9y agoCool project. 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.
- camillomiller 9y agoNever 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
- lr4444lr 9y agoCan you give some examples of what succeeds on your side of the pond?
- cbcoutinho 9y agoHow is quantifying your contribution to a company on a CV not taken positively?
- wott 9y agoBecause 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.
- dreamfactored 9y agoDisagree 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.
- exception_e 9y agoBrilliant. I am looking to redo my portfolio site and this will help with wording examples
- rohanm93 9y agoGreat! Thanks for the feedback
- umbrae 9y agoFYI, your parent website refer room has an expired SSL cert which causes it to be unavailable in chrome. Looks like it expired 2 days ago.
- rohanm93 9y agoAh thank you! I've renewed the certificate now.
- headhunter 9y agoThese 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
- PerryCox 9y agoStep 1 of having a good resume: copy a good employee's resume. :P
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoFailing up is a real thing.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- goodroot 9y agoAt an old company after being acquired we built a blind-hiring system. No resumes. The WallStreet Journal wrote about it, it was popular. 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'.
- komali2 9y ago>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!"
- jcun4128 9y agoI 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.
- stingraycharles 9y agoRegarding 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?
- quickben 9y agoPresumably, he did that expenditure and revenue math before he decided to start hiring for the role.
- 9y ago
- s3nnyy 9y agoIn 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 https://youtu.be/5hsTnTeZk-k?t=1013 (btw. Europeans are much worse at "selling" themselves / using numbers compared to their North American counterparts)
- rohanm93 9y agoJust watched your video. Love it! Fully agree.
- gingerlime 9y agoHaving 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...
- Diederich 9y agoHuh...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?
- ci5er 9y agoI 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.
- Diederich 9y agoThanks for your feedback. I am in the SF Bay area, and I do (and have been doing what is now called) "devops".
- Mz 9y agoI 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.)
- jansho 9y agoIt's a bit disheartening to read those cool resume lines. Back to the garage I go, for that one-in-a-million smash-hit product ;)
- rohanm93 9y agoGood luck!
- quickben 9y agoSearch bar doesn't work in latest Firefox/Edge. 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.
- rohanm93 9y agoNope, 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!
- nnd 9y agoI 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.
- rohanm93 9y agoUnfortunately, 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.
- aaronaarzelbart 9y agoThis feels dodgy.
- GoToRO 9y agoThis 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.
- Kiro 9y ago> totally ignoring that a bellow average team can do much better than a hero can 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.