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Make applying for jobs less painful

I've gone through multiple periods where I've submitted application after application with only a fraction of companies calling me back. During that time I did a lot of research and I took all the possible steps to get more interviews including hiring professional resume writers, reading dozens of blogs, meeting with recruiters outside of roles to understand how they do what they do, and meeting with career coaches. Key things I learned were:

  1. Recruiters use ATS (Applicant Tracking System) to auto-read your resume and match your compatibility with a job posting. Your resume needs to structured so the ATS system can best parse through it so pretty resume's with lots of styles are not going to cut it.

  2. A resume should be catered to a role. One size fits all doesn't work very well here. Although you can apply for the same positions (e.g. business analyst, data scientist, project manager, etc), each company and role will have some different expectations of what they want out of a candidate. Some might be more tech focused while others care more about how well you work in teams. The language of your resume should reflect your experience in those areas.

  3. Grammar matters. This seems obvious but so many people apply with poorly written resumes that they've been rejected before they had a chance.

  4. Your resume should reflect your accomplishments, not your day-to-day work. If you worked on a project that saved the company $50,000, you should add that. Don't put things like "responsible for quarter-end billing consolidation" as a finance analyst. What did achievements did you accomplish?

Although #4 is purely on the job seeker to provide, the first 3 items I felt could be solved with AI. Take a poorly written, poorly structured resume and rewrite it so it not only sounds better, but also reflects the candidates experience with what the company is looking for.

, Founder of Icon for Flavored Resume
Flavored Resume
on June 5, 2023