Free Resume Feedback From Your Peers

This is a guest post by Kate Gatto.

Company: Razume.com
Slogan: Your Resume Review Company
Pros: Resume rating scales; information blackouts for privacy.
Cons: Anonymity; inability to ask follow up questions; weak profile pages

Razume is an online community that lets you upload your resume and get it reviewed by a community of users who have also submitted their resumes. This lets you get comments and suggestions for improvements on your resume in an entirely anonymous atmosphere.

Your privacy on Razume is 100% guaranteed.  As a matter of fact, it’s mandatory.  You are forced to block out any identifying information on your resume when you submit them for review.  Which is great if you don’t want your boss to know that you’re getting ready to go back on the market. However, it’s lousy if you’re hoping to do your search under the radar while making connections.

Razume might want to consider hiring the Resume Hunter.

The anonymity of your commenter’s is a double-edged sword: comments can be really on target, or very vague, either way, you have no way to ask a follow up question.  Also, I have no way of going back to see which resumes I’ve commented on.  This information should be available from my main profile page. Negative or mean-spirited comments can easily be deleted.

Karma points are earned by participating in the Razume community: by rating other resumes, providing or approving constructive comments for resumes, referring friends to post their resumes, submitting constructive ideas to improve the Razume community and engaging in other community-strengthening actions.

The system seems to be reasonably reliable, as long as you don’t try to upload too many resumes at one time or make an excessively long comment.  Razume let’s you make comments in bubbles, use a free form drawing tool or black out boxes.  Multiple colors are available to suit your mood or color code.

At the time of this posting there are only 148 resumes in the database.  We also did experience a couple of errors which resulted in our comments not being saved (very frustrating!). However, bugs are to be expected, and we like the concept and encourage you to give it a try.  Professional resume writers shouldn’t expect to shutter up their operations, however, they can earn some good karma by helping out job seekers for free.