We said this before and we say it again; if you are looking for a job, one of the most important things for any employer is your resume. Previously we covered a tool, Resumesimo that helps you create visually appealing resumes for your work. This time around we take a look at Resump.
Resumup is a great online tool for If visualizing your resume in a visual ‘timeline’ view. Not only does it help you create stylish resumes but it also helps you choose your desired career path as well (although that feature is currently in beta stage and is invitation based only).
You can sign in with your Facebook or LinkedIn ID and Resumup will automatically take all the information that you may have already entered in those services and uses it to give your resume a visual look. Alternately you can simply sign up on the website and navigate to settings to connect your Facebook and LinkedIn Profile to do it.
Resumup makes a very easy to read timeline of your education/job history (the visual timeline consists of little colored bars atop an x-axis, that can quickly communicate what your education and work history). But Resumup also and takes into account achievements & honors, educational activities, projects and even part time jobs. It has a section for your hobbies, languages, and other features. It also has a section which is basically shows a psycho-social analysis that shows a graph with two extremes like Outgoing vs. Reserved, Carefree vs. Efficient, etc, and you can select the balance that best describes your identity or what type of person you are. You demographics can be on the right hand side and include information such as status, salary, position, educational level, job type, and mobility. A traditional text version of the resume is also available!
Of interest is the ‘transferrable skills’ option that breaks with the ‘here’s my history’ layout and allows you to add your generic skills, and allow you to emphasize skills that you are an expert at.
After completing your Resume, you can download it as a PDF as well by clicking the download button link. (Note: this did not seem to work in Chrome when we tested it, but worked in IE).
The good:
Resumup is a very useful tool for fresh graduates and experienced professionals alike, and with its support for LinkedIn and Facebook it can make creating a resume a rather easy affair.
Aside from the ease of use, Resumup can deliver a resume that stands out from the crowd and looks both different and interesting, and can be a very powerful tool to get noticed.
The career planning section is really interesting, and to be honest looks like it can be more of an added value tool than the resume building function; at the point of this writing, however, it is beta invite only and we weren’t able to get into it.
The bad:
One thing we would have changed though, is the ability to get rid of some of the sections that it inserts into the resume altogether. What if I didn’t want to put in any information about my ‘hobbies’ or my personal traits or the salary widget, etc, and wanted to focus on some of the other things. Also, I would have liked to be able to resize the timeline, and/or rearrange some of the other elements.
Also the ability to go in and flesh out the traditional ‘text’ section is somewhat limited
The Verdict:
Resumup is a good tool that can spit out an instant interesting resume, but feels somewhat gimmicky and unfinished, with a lot of really useless features that many people will not want and most employers probably do not care about. The Resumup folks have a good thing going here, but it needs to mature quite a bit before it can deliver on its promise as a value-added resume creation tool.
