u/bholechature07

After 2 months of silence on every application. one night, half joking, i thought: on dating apps the profiles that work are the ones that sound like a person.

mine sounded like a job description had written a job description.

So:

swapped the stiff headshot for one where i'm actually mid-laugh then rewrote the headline from "Senior Marketing Analyst / Data-Driven Strategies" to basically what i'd say at a party, "i figure out why people click ads (and why they don't)".

About section went from third-person corporate to first-person, 4 sentences, one number, one joke.

Two weeks: 4 recruiter inmails and one literally said my profile didn't sound like every other page she scrolls past.

So what i understood - recruiters are humans scrolling hundreds of identical profiles. same-sounding means you’re invisible.

I’m not saying turn linkedin into Tinder.

i'm saying we've all optimized ourselves into the same beige template. Share your more outrageous but positive things you’ve done to standout.

I have a good job and thought I would f around a bit.

so: same resume, same 80 companies, split 40/40. pdf to one half, docx to the other.

applied within the same 3 days, same roles, same seniority.

docx: 11 callbacks.

pdf: 4.

I'm not claiming this is science.

sample's small and the companies weren't identical, and it's very possible i got lucky but a 3x gap made me look into it and apparently a lot of older ATS setups still parse .docx cleanly and mangle pdfs made by certain tools, mine was exported from canva, which i now think was the actual problem, not pdf as a format.

so the tip might really be don't export from canva.

has anyone seen a diff?

I would love to be wrong because my pdf looks much better hehhe

I recently paid a career coach $150/session for two months. He would d given me the LinkedIn optimization guidelines a the end of it too.

Not much changed for me so ran my linkedin through Careerflow's free review out of curiosity, and it flagged some stuff, headline wasted on my job title, no keywords in my about section, that the coach never once brought up.

So either the tool is truly legit or it's generic advice that just sounded smart because of a bad career coach.

Give reviews ppl if u have used it?

started the spreadsheet in month two out of spite. every application, where i found it, when i sent it and whether anyone replied.

turned it into charts last night.

the biggest difference was where i applied. referrals had a 34% response rate. indeed had 4%. most of my applications went through indeed.

the things i spent weeks changing barely made a difference. i used three resume versions and the response rates were almost identical.

the full charts are in the gamma deck below. uploaded the sheet and it built them in about ten minutes.

happy to answer questions about the data.

the ghosted count is still changing. two recruiters from april replied last week.

if anyone wants i can share the spreadsheet/deck

In consideration paralysis rn.

Rezi looks strongest for pure resume building, teal for tracking, careerflow seems widest with all the things. can only justify paying for one.

If you've used 2 or more of these, which one actually correlated with more callbacks?