Launches RezScore.com to give resume writing tips
Many times, those resumes are indistinguishable from the thousands of others received by hiring managers. Otherwise eligible candidates lose out on positions because of simple mistakes in their resumes. It can be disheartening.
To solve that problem, a Rutgers–Camden law student has launched a free online service designed to help resumes stand out from the crowd and remove all doubt from a job search.
Sean Weinberg, of Cherry Hill, is co-founder of RezScore.com, a website that instantly grades resumes and provides specific tips to make them better and catch the eye of prospective employers.
“One of the main problems job seekers have is that they have no frame of reference for a quality resume,” says Weinberg, a second-year student at the Rutgers School of Law–Camden. “You should be able to instantly know if your resume is any good. Many people spend months sending out resumes with no feedback and they want to know why. It’s likely that the resume isn’t very attractive or effective, but they just don’t know it.”
Weinberg designed a program that identifies the flaws in a resume and makes recommendations on how to fix them. He built RezScore.com with Gerrit Hall, a friend he met while working at a recruiting firm in New York.
“We went to everyone we knew in human resources and talked to recruiters and hiring managers and we asked them to grade resumes,” Weinberg explains. “We found that the things that really work on a resume are consistent across all industries and levels of experience. So, we built an algorithm that instantly evaluates resumes in comparison to those that were given an ‘A’ grade.”
At RezScore.com, a job seeker uploads a resume, receives an overall grade, and gets a score for impact, brevity, and depth. The program singles out all of the pros and cons so the job seeker can see what is effective or ineffective about the resume.
The RezScore grading service and resume tips are free, but Weinberg also offers resume rewrites by human resources professionals for a fee.
“We’ve gotten a ton of feedback and people are grateful for it,” Weinberg says. “We’ve received a lot of e-mails from people who say they started getting calls for interviews after they used RezScore to fix their resumes.”
The site formally launched in January and almost 70,000 resumes have been uploaded within the past three months. Their target audience is college graduates, but many people who are out of work or looking for a new job use the service, too.
Weinberg says common mistakes include passive writing, incomplete sentences, and including an objective line on the resume. The most successful resumes highlight the skills and accomplishments of a candidate and put those skills in context.
Weinberg is studying business law at Rutgers–Camden and wants to practice start-up law and consult start-up companies. But until then, and at a time when the job market is particularly challenging for new lawyers, he says his plan is to continue to grow RezScore.com.
“There are amazing candidates out there with terrible resumes,” Weinberg says. “A person’s ability to write a resume is not reflective of their ability to be a good salesman. There are jobs out there. We wanted to help people get them.”
-30-
Media Contact: Ed Moorhouse
(856) 225-6759
E-mail: ejmoor@camden.rutgers.edu