
Show HN: Resume Worded – Write impactful resumes - rohanm93
https://resumeworded.com
======
taco_emoji
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?

~~~
msky
I started testing topics and the lack of technical resumes actually made me
wonder - how will they _continue_ to get more?

~~~
rohanm93
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!

------
gingerlime
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...

~~~
Diederich
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?

~~~
ci5er
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.

~~~
Diederich
Thanks for your feedback.

I am in the SF Bay area, and I do (and have been doing what is now called)
"devops".

------
m52go
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.

~~~
rohanm93
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.

~~~
tedsanders
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.

~~~
rohanm93
Great - I've just changed it to effective for now, and will think about what I
can update it to going forward. Thanks for the suggestion!

------
komali2
>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!"

~~~
sdiupIGPWEfh
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.

~~~
enraged_camel
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.

~~~
bsjob
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."

~~~
enraged_camel
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.

------
godelski
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'.

~~~
rohanm93
Great point - thanks for that. I'll fix that this weekend.

------
headhunter
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

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
Failing up is a real thing.

------
leroy_masochist
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.

~~~
bayonetz
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.

~~~
dreamfactored
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.

------
mrleinad
Great. Now I can scrape all these quotes, build random resumes with them, and
do some A/B testing with recruiters.

~~~
godelski
I 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
Seriously. 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-...](https://www.boredpanda.com/computer-deep-learning-algorithm-
painting-masters/)

------
goodroot
At 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'.

------
Mz
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.)

------
megous
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.

~~~
notahacker
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....

~~~
rohanm93
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.

------
camillomiller
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

~~~
earlybike
> 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.

~~~
camillomiller
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.

~~~
earlybike
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.

------
dpcx
How are these resume lines "proven?"

~~~
KhalPanda
At 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
They make you pay for that? Interesting, there’s a market for everything.

~~~
rohanm93
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!

~~~
1337biz
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).

~~~
rohanm93
Thanks for the feedback! The pricing is something a lot of people have asked
about so I will review it in the coming month.

------
exception_e
Brilliant. I am looking to redo my portfolio site and this will help with
wording examples

~~~
rohanm93
Great! Thanks for the feedback

------
arkitaip
Since no one else can use these lines, I guess they are only useful as an
inspiration?

~~~
rohanm93
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.

------
mead5432
Noticed 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.

~~~
FLUX-YOU
One of the biggest things they explain in their reasoning:
[https://resumeworded.com/learn-more.php](https://resumeworded.com/learn-
more.php)

~~~
rohanm93
Thanks for linking our Learn More page!

------
s3nnyy
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](https://youtu.be/5hsTnTeZk-k?t=1013)

(btw. Europeans are much worse at "selling" themselves / using numbers
compared to their North American counterparts)

~~~
rohanm93
Just watched your video. Love it! Fully agree.

------
jansho
It'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
Good luck!

------
GoToRO
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.

~~~
Kiro
> 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.

~~~
GoToRO
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.

~~~
Kiro
Good point. I didn't think of synergy effects.

------
Animats
Then at the receiving end, the machine learning system that reads the resumes
recognizes these lines and does - what?

------
hellofunk
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.

~~~
rohanm93
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.

------
nnd
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.

~~~
rohanm93
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.

------
dsacco
Cool 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.

~~~
rohanm93
Hey! I emailed you to follow up on the points above. Thank you so much!

------
quickben
Search 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
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!

------
umbrae
FYI, 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
Ah thank you! I've renewed the certificate now.

------
bharris62
kinda cool, no where worth 25 dollars/month. myperfectresume has a bunch of
lines to, and its free to get inspiration from theres....

~~~
MikeTheGreat
To 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
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)

~~~
rohanm93
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.

------
adtac
How were these resumes sourced?

~~~
sgwae
post job offers with no real job.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
Then how can you determine which lines were most _effective_ if those lines
didn't result in anyone actually being hired?

~~~
satanic_pope
^ Sharp rebuttal that.

------
aaronaarzelbart
This feels dodgy.

