Rezscore - Need free advice on the effectiveness of your resume?

Taken for http://lifehacker.com/5719489/rezscore-grades-your-resumes-and-offers-free-advice

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BY ADAM DACHIS

DEC 28, 2010 10:30 AM

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RezScore Grades Your Resumes and Offers Free Advice

RezScore is a webapp analyzes your uploaded resume and provides surprisingly accurate advice. If you're applying for a new job and need to get your resume in shape, it could be a very helpful tool.

The functionality of RezScore is very, very simple. You upload a resume, opt in or out of being contacted about further help, and RezScore generates a page full of advice to help you improve.

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I uploaded an old resume of mine and got a pretty low and pretty accurate grade. I scored high on brevity, which—always to the surprise of people who know me—has been on of my strong suits, but scored low on impact and depth. As you can see from the suggestions to the right, my resume needs to improve from a better vocabulary and a more professional tone. It also felt the parser had difficulty—likely because this particular resume had a non-traditional layout—but that didn't stop any of the advice from being pertinent. It even gave me a list of the most used words in my resume. A number beside each word would be helpful, however, because many of the words I used frequently were actually not all that frequent—I just used them more than once (with the exception of "design," which I used four times).

There are two things to be aware of with this service: RezScore seems to focus on traditional resumes and traditional jobs. The resume I used as a sample was designed to apply for visual media work, and so it concentrated heavily on the look and much less on the content. RezScore seemed to view it as a marketing resume, likely because my job history was primarily with advertising and marketing firms, even though it was heavily focused on video and design. For most jobs, this service should work just fine. For jobs that require a less traditional resume, RezScore may miss the mark a little. That said, it wasn't wrong about its suggestions. This resume had a very casual tone to it and would, undoubtedly, be viewed as informal. This was intentional, which is why I suggest the advice is geared toward the more formal, traditional resume.

Finally, you should be careful about what you upload. You may want to upload a version of your resume without contact information of any kind, as RezScore parses your resume for this information. While I don't know what RezScore does with this information (beyond contact you, if you opt in)—and it may be nothing at all—it's probably a good idea to keep your address and phone number off the resume you upload if you're concerned about giving it to them.

UPDATE: RezScore contacted me to let me know that they "do not sell your information to anyone and only [they] have access to it," solely for the purpose of contacting you based on the contact preferences you specify.

RezScore | viaMakeUseOf

You can contact Adam Dachis, the author of this post, at adachis@lifehacker.com. You can also follow him on Twitter and Facebook.