Garbage in, garbage out

There are a lot of services now that will tailor your resume to a job posting. Paste the job, upload the resume, wait twenty seconds, download the new one. Some of them are good at it. I have used several, and I noticed the same gap in all of them.

Not one of them ever told me whether my resume was any good to begin with.

Rewriting a weak resume for a specific job gives you a weak resume for a specific job. The rewrite cannot add evidence that was never there.

This is garbage in, garbage out with a monthly subscription attached. If your bullets describe duties instead of results, if there is not a single number anywhere in ten years of work, if your most recent role has one line under it — no amount of rephrasing against a job description fixes any of that. The tailoring step is real and useful, but it is the second step. Running it first is like ironing a shirt you have not washed.

So the review comes first

This week the profile got a review of its own. It reads your whole work history and comes back with a score and, more usefully, with specific feedback attached to the specific field that earned it. Not “strengthen your bullets”. The bullet, the reason, and what is missing from it.

The score is a deterministic formula, not a number a model invents. The model’s job is narrow: look at each line and decide whether a specific problem is present, and how serious it is. The arithmetic that turns those judgments into a score happens in ordinary code, where I can read it and so can you. If the number ever looks wrong, I want to be able to find out why rather than shrug at it.

It persists, too. The score and the guidance are stored against the profile, so reopening the page does not mean spending another AI run to see what you were told last time. Free AI runs are a real budget here, and a tool that burns one every time you glance at it is a tool that punishes you for reading your own feedback.

The order I want the product to teach

There is an implied sequence in all of this, and I would rather say it out loud than hope people find it:

• Put everything in the profile. All of it. The profile is the superset — it is not a resume and it is not supposed to be short.
• Review it, and fix what the review finds. This is the step that actually changes outcomes, and it is the step every tailoring tool skips.
• Then tailor for a specific job, where the tailoring is a selection from material that is already strong.

Most of the products in this space sell step three, because step three demos well. Step two is the one that gets someone an interview.

A redirect that had to have a hole in it

The other piece of this week is a small infrastructure decision I like. The old domain now redirects permanently to the new one — with a deliberate exception for /api/*.

The reason is the browser extension. A version of it is already published in the stores and installed on people’s machines, and it posts captured job postings to the old domain. A permanent redirect on a POST is not a redirect in the way you want: browsers re-issue the request to the new address and drop the body on the way. Every capture would have arrived empty.

So the API paths on the old domain keep answering for real. That carve-out stays until the new extension build has been adopted, and it is the sort of thing that is invisible if you get it right and silently breaks other people’s software if you get it wrong.