Add a Skill to Your Resume

We are not shady. The job market sometimes is.

A recruiter once told one of us that a job was a perfect match, apart from one thing: the resume did not say Google Cloud Spanner. We had never used Google Cloud Spanner. "That's fine, just put it in. They only search for the word."

If you have looked for work for more than a week, you have had this call. The recruiter is paid when you are hired, the employer's software throws out resumes that lack the word, and you are the one who will sit in the interview. Everybody in the chain gets what they want except the person asked to explain how Spanner handles a split.

We are not going to tell you what to do. Sometimes you know the thing under another name, or used its nearest cousin for five years, and the word really is all that is missing. Sometimes you need the interview and will spend the weekend learning it. And sometimes the honest answer to the recruiter is no. It is your resume and your interview.

What this does

You pick a resume and type the skill. You get back a summary that names it, your skills list with it added, and up to three lines to put under the jobs where it fits best. It takes about 15 seconds, which leaves most of the recruiter's hour for deciding whether to send it.

Then it lists the questions an interviewer is likely to ask you about that skill. That is the part to read twice. If you cannot answer them by the day of the interview, it will be an awkward one.

What it will not do

It adds the skill and stops there. It does not invent an employer, a job title, a project, a certificate or a number to back the skill up, and it does not say how many years you have used it. It writes the lines; you decide which of them are true enough to send.

What it costs

A free account gets 1 free. After that it comes with the Fast and First plans, as often as recruiters call. See plans