MVL
It's serviceable. I wouldn't call it the earth shattering glory that others seem to have.
Alright, so you've heard about Rezi - likely from one of the various banner ads spammed all across the Interwebs. I'm not going to tell you it's a bad tool. It's not. The problem is that someone up there didn't bother to actually evaluate their own tool. But before all that, here's what it does right. ✅ It's confusing, but basically, it wants you to give it some text - a job title and maybe one bullet - and then it will (if you want) suggest additional bullets that it thinks will help pass ATS scoring. This mostly works. I only had a few issues here it didn't seem to understand how to write the bullet. You could just use it as a builder and not use the AI if you wanted, not sure why you'd do that though. ✅ It will format the resume in a way that's designed to bypass most computers while still being mostly readable to humans. ✅ It will take what's on the resume and generate a cover letter for you. The cover letter is of passable quality - but it tends to get Education wrong (see below). Here's where it fluffed - and it's technology, I don't expect perfection, but these are silly errors. 🚫 Your "Format" score will likely be low if you're like me and you have a significant amount of experience. See, Rezi gives you NINE (9!) categories to fill in. Of those, two may not apply, but everything else likely will have something. Regardless, just my work experience, summary and contact information of the past 17 years filled up the first page. That's not abnormal. The problem is, Rezi will basically fail you, saying your resume is too long. You can't do anything about that. I suspect what's happening is that whoever at Rezi programmed this thing is making the faulty assumption of many employers: that you've worked at each job for minimum 5-10 years. The current median tenure of employees is 3 years. So within a 20 year span of time, I've worked at 7 companies, but within two of those companies I was promoted multiple times. Those have to be separate entries because they're separate jobs. Someone needs to reprogram this to stop being so picky about "one page long" - because even if you only had 3 jobs but you had a lot of technical certs or maybe you have a lot of college degrees, it'll still punish you for going 2 pages deep. It's broken. And no, the answer is not to exclude skills/education, because ATS looks for that. The right answer here is for the tool (Rezi) to STOP squawking about 1 page. That guidance has not been relevant for at least 16 years now because it assumes a human looking at it, which is rarely the case anymore. I can cite multiple sources that say, as long as your resume doesn't exceed 5 pages, you're largely good to go. Recommendation is not to exceed 3-4 pages unless absolutely necessary due to experience. 🚫 The Education section is fairly straightforward. I listed my undergraduate certificate. But when generating the cover letter, it straight up fabricated a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in two different majors. I SUSPECT this is the tool looking at my length and diversity of experience and making assumptions; otherwise this is way broken. The right answer is for the tool to read what the user entered for Education and use ONLY that. I'm not going to save and edit because then you're burning AI credits needlessly. 🚫 To use the AI, you need to purchase "credits" which are charged against however many words/bullets you have the AI add in for you. On the surface it's not a bad deal, but their "Lifetime" service doesn't give you recurring credits to use. That means that if you plan to use this to keep your resume fresh (not a bad idea in general), you'll be paying regardless. Saying they charge because it's a third-party tool doesn't address my feedback. What I'm saying is, figure out a way to make "LIFETIME" not have any charges past the first. I don't care how you do that. Charge $200 for LIFETIME if you must. Ultimately, "LIFETIME" is meaningless if you're still spending money past the first spend. I'm not saying not to use the service. I'm saying that it needs a lot of work. And no, it's not "Rezi isn't for you" - it's that Rezi makes too many assumptions about what a resume should be like, and fails you improperly. Their own FAQ saying "well this is how we think, you don't like it go elsewhere" is indicative of the same attitude issues found with Rezi's reply below: they don't care to improve.
Response from ReziMay 12, 2021
Hey, Marcus thank you for the detailed review, it's appreciated. I'll try to touch on the same points. For the Rezi Score, if you ignore the warning, your resume will still be okay. It's okay to use judgment if you think your use case falls outside of our recommendations. Totally no problem. 1 - the one-page rule is applied since we believe that creating a tailored resume that speaks to the job description is the best practice 2. The ai for the cover letter is trained to match the resume but it is possible for specifics to be slightly off - we recommend some slight editing post generation. 3. The ai has to be usage-based since we are using a third-party API - luckily, the credits are extremely affordable. The price to generate a full cover letter is approximately $.40 Again, it just seems like Rezi was not the perfect case for someone with your vast experience, but in the future, we can certainly develop the Rezi Score to accommodate these recommendations. Thank you again for taking the time to review.