How an HR Professional and Her Husband Found New Jobs Using Jobscan

This is part of our Customer Stories series, where we ask real job seekers about their experience using Jobscan tools. Click here to read more stories.

After a company restructuring, where her human resources position was eliminated, Jennifer found herself on the job hunt. It was the third layoff of her career, so she was ready to hit the ground running. 

Her first thought? 

“I need to use Jobscan again.”

Finding success with Jobscan

Jobscan’s resume scanner is Jennifer’s go-to tool when it comes time to applying for new roles. She was introduced to Jobscan while working in the career transition space, and she recommends it to those facing job loss or layoffs. 

After her first layoff, Jennifer thought she had the upper hand in the job search. “Having been someone in the HR space who’d spent a lot of time recruiting and interviewing and doing literally the full spectrum HR work for a retail company, I thought I would be uniquely qualified to enter the job market and found out very quickly that I was not.”

She didn’t understand the applicant tracking system (ATS), how it worked, or how to apply for jobs strategically. Once she learned the role of the ATS in storing resumes and acting as search databases for recruiters, Jennifer sought the right tool to help. 

Her background in HR taught her one key lesson: “If someone doesn’t have access to good tools or doesn’t know what they don’t know, they’re being singled out or silenced in that job search. Jobscan changes that game 100%.”

When her role was eliminated, she turned to Jobscan to help. But not only was she looking for a new role—her husband Derek was also experiencing his first layoff. 

A reluctant resume writer

Derek wasn’t an enthusiastic resume writer. “I know he was not using Jobscan. He was not optimizing every resume,” Jennifer said. “And then he would say to me, ‘I’m not getting called back.'”

“Or on the flip side, he’d get what I call the ‘Dear John’ letter, which says, ‘Thank you for your application, but we’re going to move forward with other candidates.'”

He wasn’t as well-practiced with resume writing, according to Jennifer. “This was his first time having to truly organically search for a job from ground zero. Every job he’s ever gained was through a networking contact or someone at another organization that he used to work with.”

Jennifer offered her expertise. “I applied for a job for him because I optimized his resume for him.” Once he adopted resume optimization with Jobscan’s tools, he found traction in his job hunt. 

His total job search was roughly two and a half to three months, according to Jennifer, and he interviewed for five or six companies before finding the perfect job for the next phase of his career. 

Tailoring her resume led to instant results

Jennifer knows the payoff of tailoring your resume. She applied for a role on a whim with LinkedIn’s Easy Apply, using an old resume saved in LinkedIn. And it got rejected. 

She said to herself, “You know what, I’m just going to follow my own advice.”

She optimized her resume, reapplied, and got a call two days later. From an old resume to an optimized resume, the hiring manager’s interest in her as a candidate skyrocketed. “That resume optimization is what got me in front of the decision-makers.”

She believes so strongly that resume optimization is critical, that she knows there’s no other way. “I know that if I don’t optimize the resume, I might as well not apply because it’s just not going to get anywhere.

The power of Power Edit

While Jennifer is comfortable with editing her resume based on the resume scanner report, the Power Edit tool comes in handy. She’s seen clients in her HR role fall under what she calls “analysis paralysis”. 

“It’s very hard to talk about yourself,” she says. “It’s very hard to come up with ways of describing your accomplishments or putting them on paper that don’t sound redundant. That’s where I think Power Edit can be very useful.”

Power Edit can simplify resume optimization by providing tailored phrase recommendations to elevate your resume quality. 

Jennifer’s job hunt with Jobscan

In her most recent job search, Jennifer was on the hunt for roles as a human resources business partner (HRBP) or an HR generalist. 

“I needed to really revamp my whole resume from being just a business-focused HR partner.” Instead, she needed to focus on highlighting skills in the areas most valuable to potential employers.

So she revised her resume and uploaded it with the job description to see how close she was by assessing her resume match score. It’s one of Jennifer’s favorite features of the tool. The higher her resume score, the greater her confidence.

When she gets a high match score in her first scan, she feels a bolt of accomplishment. “I felt like this time around, when I first revised my resume and then went to compare it to the job description, I was already at a 65 percent match just out of the gate,” she said. 

“Using Jobscan multiple times in a row has taught me how to be better about how I word my resume and the types of words I use.”

The suggestions offered by the match report provide insights into her writing and make her a better resume writer. It lets her adjust her resume organically, in her own words. 

Resume optimization was key in the job search for both Jennifer and Derek. Jennifer tackled her job search with confidence in finding her next HR role, and Derek found his dream job working as a supervisor in a warehouse specializing in aftermarket lights for sports cars and other vehicles.

It proves that whether you’re in a corporate world or a manufacturing industry, resume optimization matters in the job search. Jobscan makes that easy, simple, and fast.