Comment by mcenedella | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcenedella | Hacker News Reader

I’ve built a service to write technical resumes for free at www.leetresumes.com You provide your existing resume, answer ten questions, and in a couple days I’ll email your improved resume back to you, optimized for resume readers, parsers, and what hiring managers are looking for in 2021.

We’re just starting out, so we can probably handle 1,000 or so resumes per week. Hopefully, as we automate, we’ll be able to handle more volume, but right now, there’s still humans in the loop to ensure quality at Leet Resumes: https://leetresumes.com/

If you’re interested in our internals, expertise and philosophy on resume optimization, I’ve written our detailed technical documentation here: https://leetresumes.com/blog/leet-resumes-technical-resume-d...

And some examples of “before” and “after” are here: https://leetresumes.com/examples It might or might not surprise you that multiple colors, multiple columns, and filling your resume up with stuff other than your accomplishments is bad.

We believe in being transparent, open, data-driven, and helpful, so let me know what you think!

Hey Marc,

I'm not as cynical as notretarded, but I do wonder how you'll eventually make money. It can't be cheap to manually edit 1,000+ resumes weekly, so it does make me wonder what the end goal is and what the paid services will look like. Maybe some AI/data play?

Your blueprint to good technical resumes is super useful though-- I run a technical interview course and mentor quite a number of software engineers, will definitely share out.

I used to use the ladders all the time when looking for jobs, so thanks for creating that service too.

Thanks so much sciencewolf! Cycnicism is OK - there have been a lot of crappy products in this space and devs are sick and tired of LinkedIn spam.

The plan is to become a trusted partner to engineers and technologists - helping to update their resume yearly, produce better resumes by having a deeper insight into their performance. That trust and that relationship will be super valuable and I'm sure we'll find the business model.

As mentioned in FAQs -- "In the future, we will offer additional upgraded services for purchase such as resume distribution, hosting, tracking, salary negotiation, vetted job opportunities, recruiter outreach and cover letter writing." -- but at this moment we don't really know.

The core product today is writing resumes and building that trust. I think if we do that very well, we'll have a lot of opportunities to make a successful business out of it. If we do that poorly, we'll have nothing.

If you fail to find a business model and run out of money, will you choose to shut down the business over extracting money from that trust?

Reading a few of the blog posts, and the FAQ, I'm not sure you're getting to why engineers are bad at writing resumes, what the fundamental disconnect is when they try to do situation-behavior-response type stuff. It's not because "resumes are not written in a programming language."

I personally grokked it when I was writing up some peer review. I thought I was making a compelling case: I showed where he had solved a tough problem, how he worked through problems, resolved it and thought I was establishing that the guy was on an upward trajectory.

My manager kicked it back and was trying to explain what he needed. We went back and forth, and finally he said, "look, I'm going to be in a room full of other managers, and I need ammo to get Chris a promotion."

That was when it clicked. I had learned persuasive writing in an environment where it pays to spend a lot of time making your case. But on a promotion board, there might be a dozen managers trying to get a word in edgewise, so they need to make their case with simple, unambiguous facts.

So it's a matter of it being a writing style that meets a specific need, and which engineers aren't trained in.

Great points Ben. That is persuasive :) I'll add this comment to my reminders as I update the FAQ this weekend. Thanks so much!

I'm presuming you're the same Marc Cenedella from 'the ladders' from so many years ago? Just signed up - interested to see what your system does. :)

Thanks! Yes!

A helpful post might be some tips on what to track as your career progresses. Or a tool to do so might be a way to build your client base.

By their nature, the things hiring managers look for on a resume are very similar to what they look for in performance reviews, so having that material always up to date is a good practice.

Another good point, Ben. You seem interested in this stuff - would love to chat further - i'm myfirstname at leetresumes dot com.

We're intending to have a regular check-in to collect facts throughout the years that we then save until you're ready to update your resume. We've also thought about how we could be helpful in 1-on-1s, promotion reviews, and annual performance reviews.

On your examples, for the first resume, your bullet points are inconsistent. Sometimes the second line of a multiline sentence has one and sometimes it doesn't. It was the first thing I noticed.

Thanks - rendering error in conversion from GDoc. Fixed.

That's a nice initiative.

Any reason why you are restricting users having experience in US/Canada alone? I am from India and I do need help creating a resume.

Also wondering that. If the resume is written in English does it matter where in the world it's being sent? Or it might be related to the "premium features" that are mentioned, since initially you can only monetize US/CAN based resume/employees

As mentioned in other comments, our expertise, data, and insights are based on North American hiring practices. European CVs differ in practice quite a bit - for one glaring example, the common presence of a photo of the user on the resume. Our system is not at all capable of handling that today.

No thanks. I am not giving you my résumé so you can harvest it for job seeker market insights.

OK, I don't know what that means. More important than what users write, is what the audience wants -- hiring managers, HR departments, recruiters, to a lesser extent the ATSs that companies use. Those are the real drivers of resume-writing insights.

For developer job market insights, aggregated data such as StackOverflow's annual Developer Survey are far superior to anything you could glean from a few thousand resumes: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020

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