AI to revamp your resume: is it a paid tool worth?

Overview

After reading a Linkedin Top Voice post, I got curious about her suggestion of using an AI tool to help revamping the resume. The website is called https://resumeworded.com/.

The website offers three main services:

• Resume check - It analyzes the CV and produces a score and recommendations about it
• LinkedIn profile check - Same as the resume, but with the LinkedIn profile
• Resume targeting - Given a job description, it tells how far the resume is from it

This post is about my experience with it.

Free vs. paid versions

For each voice, there is a free and a paid version. The former offers the most basic checks, while the latter dives a lot deeper in the analysis.

I first played aroud with the free offer, and then decided to buy a one month subscription for the full version, to give it a proper try (full details on costs in the conclusions).

Check deep dive

Let’s dive into all the available checks.

If you’re interested in the conclusions you can skip this section, but you’ll miss all the differences between paid and free version. In order to give an order of magnitude, I’ve hid the paid checks behind a clickable dropdown.

Click on Read more for the full details

and a shortcut to conclusions.

Resume check

Along with uploading the resume, the website asks the seniority level to be checked against: Junior, Mid or Senior. From what I’ve experienced, this affects how the different sections of the resume (or linkedin profile) should weight respect to each other.

Impact

• Quantifying impact - It basically searches for any number that can be put in the resume, in order to favour a quantitative over qualitative approach.
• Repetition - This step encourages the applicant in removing repeated words. #Expand to view the 4 paid only checks
• Weak verbs - Checks for phrases like “responsibile for” or “assisted” that reduce the impact.
• Verb tenses - Checks if verbs are in the correct tense, so 1st person instead of 2nd or 3rd, and simple past instead of present continuous.
• Responsibilities - Checks if the candidate words are more focused on responsibility than accomplishments (e.g. managed x people is better than responsible for).
• Spelling and consistency - Checks for spelling errors or inconsistencies like always using British or American English.

Brevity

• Length - Checks for resume lenght. For a senior profile 1 - 2 pages are fine.
• Use of bullets - Bullet lists are deemed more effective than paragraphs.
• Total bullets - For senior positions, 12 - 32 bullet points seems to an effective count. #Expand to view the 2 paid only checks
• Bullet length - Each bullet point shoud be between 10 to 30 words.
• Filler words - Adejctive and adverbs (filler words) should be replaced by numbers.

Style

• Buzzword - Checks for words that don’t add any value, such as “good team player”, “strong leadership”.
• Dates - Checks if the resume displays all the dates consistently.
• Contact and personal details - Checks if the resume is not disclosing any unwanted information, such as date of birth or race.
• Readability - Checks if sentences are not involuted, too long, in passive voice. Sections should be easy to find with the proper keyword. #Expand to view the 3 paid only checks
• Personal Pronouns - Checks for personal pronouns, which should be avoided.
• Active voice - Checks for use of passive voice, whereas active voice should be preferred.
• Consistency - Consistency checks. For instance, it checks wheter bullet points are always ending with a dot, or don’t.

Sections

• Summary - Checks for a summary section presence. If found, it checks for correct lenght. In the paid version, it also shows buzzword and effectiveness checks.
• Education - Checks for an eduction section presence. If found, it checks if it is relevant to the candidate seniority level.
• Unnecessary section - Checks for references and objecive section, which are deemed irrelevant. For a senior level resume, also hobbies and interests should be removed.
• Skills - Checks for skills section presence. Soft skills are all for paying users.

Skills

Soft skills

Expand to view the 5 soft skills paid only checks

These checks are all about finding sentences about what the candidate did in his / her experiences.

• Communication - Presented something or lectured about something.
• Leadership - Led or coached a team, took initiative.
• Analytical - Worked with numbers, designed new processes.
• Teamwork - Coordinated with different departments, worked in team.
• Drive - More or less same checks about Leadership.

Hard skills

This section searches for the presence of keywords that should be on the resume, for instance Java on mine.

Tools

• Line Analysis - Each line is examined with the criteria as above and it can be rewritten as bullet point.
• Magic write - This asks the AI to rewrite the sentences. It can be used also in a “freestyle” mode, that is, the suggestion is then editable in a free text box. It is subjected to a credit scheme. There are also “Samples from top resumes”, but it’s an hard task to merge superhero sentences in a standard resume.
• Sample bullets - As the magic write, more oriented to bullets.
• Action verbs - List of synonims to choose from for an higher impact.

Linkedin profile check

In this case I’m instructed to export my linkedin profile in a PDF file (using the standard export function that Linkedin offers), and then upload it on the tool. Here’s a list of what gets checked:

Headline

• Headline length - This is a word count. It seems that 20 words and 168 characters are a good fit.
• Reduntant words - No repeated words
• Hard skills - Keyword match against their database of skills to use in the profile #Expand to view the 6 paid only checks
• Job titles - Job title should be present. In my case Java Developer was deemed fine.
• Language overuse - Checks for repetitions of job titles.
• Boastful language - Checks for overconfident terms.
• Special characters - Cheks if emojis have been overused.
• Buzzwords and clichés - Checks for vaporware words such as: “motivated”, “team player” or “hardworking”.
• Spelling - This checks does not affect the resume score, otherwise it would be a nigthmare, especially in tech resumes with all the languages and protocols and whatnots.

Summary

• Summary length - This is a word count. It seems that 200 - 300 words are a good fit.
• Use of special characters - Icons and emojs are fun, but should not be overused. This is what the check is about.
• Hard skills - Same checks as in the hard skills section in the headline. #Expand to view the 9 paid only checks
• Call to action - Checks if a CTA is present, such as Feel free to reach me out on…
• Readability - Checks for complex sentences, which might affect the engagement.
• Buzzwords and clichés - Checks for vaporware words such as: “motivated”, “team player” or “hardworking”.
• Use of metrics - Checks for measurable item, such as “10+ years” or “data throughtput 100K/day”.
• Active voice - Checks for passive voice sentences, which affect readability.
• Sentiment analysis - Check for a positive tone of the summary
• Tense - Cheks for sentences in 2nd or 3rd person, which should be avoided in favour of 1st person sentences.
• Spelling - Checks the spelling as in the headline.
• Special characters - Cheks if emojis have been overused.

Experience

For each experience that shows up in the profile, these checks are performed:

• Hard skills - Same checks as in the hard skills section in the headline.
• Specific job title - This one can be tricky, because titles as “Senior consultant” or “Java developer” are considered too vague. Two examples of how I’ve pleased the algorithm:
  • Senior Java backend web developer | Unicredit | SGSS Italia (this was some years ago in consultancy)
  • Java / Scala backend application and integration developer (this is my current position) #Expand to view the 8 paid only checks
• Work description details - Checks for keywords and if the work description is 50+ words long
• Recruiter red flag and unemployment indicators - Checks if the experience is, for example, a “planned career break”
• Quantified impact - Checks for measurable item, such as “10+ years” or “data throughtput 100K/day”.
• Weak language - Checks for phrases like “responsibile for” or “assisted” that reduce the impact
• Spelling - This checks does not affect the resume score, otherwise it would be a nigthmare, especially in tech resumes with all the languages and protocols and whatnots.
• Active voice - Checks for passive voice sentences, which affect readability.
• Special characters - Cheks if emojis have been overused.
• Buzzwords & clichés - Checks for vaporware words such as: “motivated”, “team player” or “hardworking”.

Education

This section checks if the education inserted matches the experience with keywords, if the dates, when not too in the past (+15 years), are reported or if there’s some reference to joining an Alumni group.

Other

Checks about other nice to have’s:

• Custom profile URL
• Honors and awards
• Location is present
• Certification section
• Professional profile photo
• Skills section

Keywords to Add

This section is about suggestions on keywords that can be added to the LinkedIn profile. The free version has a lot less suggestions than the paid one.

Keyword analysis

Paying users only - This tool rank the keywords found in the profile based on their placement (header, summary…).

Networking

Paying users only - Here there are listed some example of messages a user might want to send on LinkedIn for networking purpose.

Resume targeting

Given a job description, it tells you how much your CV matches it based on found keywords.

What I liked

• I’ve been given a lot of ideas and suggestions navigating trought the various sections of the websites. I had some doubts on my resume and those have been cleared out (spoiler: if you think that’s a bad idea, yes, it is).
• The checks are repeated through the various sections, and also that helps the overall consistence.
• Going through keywords and metrics can be exhausting, but forces the resume writer to squeeze the experiences and present them in the most effective way. I’m stating this point also in the “I did not like” section below because I think it’s the other side of the coin.
• I think that the LinkedIn profile analysis is the section that delivers the most value. Probably having a fixed structure to start with helps the tool a lot in categorizing the information.

What I did not like

• There are no multiple versions of resumes (not even for paying users). It would have been nice if more than one resume versions were allowed, for example, a longer and a shorter version.
• The free version only allows two uploads of the resume. Basically the resume should be all adjusted on the first attempt.
• A lot of typos where tech keywords.
• The keyword based checks are too rigid, sometimes it seems that only the exact match will let you score the point for the analysis. This is especially true in the resume targeting section. Also, the call to action search went through only when I used the keywords found in corresponding suggestion section.
• The tool just craves for numbers too much. Software development metrics are a lot of times different from business ones, and it’s difficult to directly link a feature release with revenues. Most of the times these are subjects for different divisions.

Conclusions

I think that there is a lot of difference between the paid and the free versions, and 40$ a month (it gets cheaper if invoiced quarterly or yearly) is indeed quite expensive. Nowadays ATS scan resumes and it’s important to give the algorithm what the algorithm wants. Tools like this provide great help in tuning the CV for this. It’s always interesting to compare what have been done with a benchmark of some kind, be it a colleague or an automated system. As of today, I payed a one month subscription and I’m keeping it only till the end of the month.

I recommed everyone to give a try to the free version. If interested, go for a one month subscription to leverage all the possibile checks.

I’ll be more than happy to know your thoughts!