Articles:

• Sample Entry Level Resumes (or, How to write an entry level resume)
• Professional Summary Example (or, How to write a professional summary for your resume)
• What to Wear to an Interview (an addendum to How to Prepare for an Interview)

Wow

June 30, 2005 I have an e-mail thread between Gavin and myself where we outline exactly what Emurse would become. The idea was that the job hunt, especially for younger folks, centers largely around the resume. They're a royal pain in the butt to create, hard to maintain and difficult to keep track of. We set out to create a ridiculously easy method for accomplishing these tasks. Our stated mission is to "Improve your job hunt," putting technology to work on the traditional aspects and not trying to replace them.

We launched initially just as a private thing between us and a few friends. Soon after we added an invite system, and eventually we opened it up to the public. The first time we publicly mentioned the project was June 22, 2006, right here on this blog.

On July 11th, a user/friend of ours sent a link to Brian over at SolutionWatch.com. From there, it was all she wrote. Lifehacker, Digg, Delicious, C|Net, USA Today, PostBubble and a host of others ran blog posts regarding our site and our user count soared. We went from hundreds of initial users, to tens of thousands over the next couple of days.

User Feedback

Overall, the feedback has been incredibly positive. We've had countless testimonials and compliments sent in via our feedback link. We've grown the feature set by listening and adapting our service to meet user suggestions. We've user tested just about every aspect of the site, and have scored extremely high marks. (Side note: people still miss the drop down menu on sections. If anyone has any suggestions here, we're most certainly open to it ;)

The web resume screen and the privacy centric details have almost entirely been user driven. We've kept many of the form elements on the resume open ended, despite many business pressures to standardize and validate. We're committed to maintaining a job seeker focus, and we've followed through on these suggestions. We aim to give our users 100% control of their resume.

Growth and Traffic

We have, for all practical purposes, never made a serious marketing push on our product. We've experimented with a few advertising channels with various degrees of success, but our growth largely centers around word of mouth and viral activity. Most of this, of course, was spurred by July's flurry of blogosphere coverage.

Here are some graphs...

Here's our raw traffic log graph (May 1st, 2006 to December 28th, 2006):



Orange represents first time visitors. Yellow represents total visits.

August is a bit skewed, as stats were dead for a decent portion of the month. The low-point for us traffic wise was actually late August, early September. It's safe to estimate that August traffic with a tad bit higher than September.

And Alexa (Internet Explorer users only, June 1st, 2006 to Dec 28th, 2006):



The big discrepancy in terms of the graph patterns is due to the inaccuracy of Alexa, which is furthered by the fact that the majority of our user base uses some variant of Netscape/Firefox/Safari (the long tail of the browser world ;). This traffic, sadly, doesn't get factored into Alexa. Sure is pretty though ;)

We're especially proud of our numbers in November and December, as these are traditionally slower traffic months due to the holidays, and we were swamped with other initiatives (not much Emurse activity during that period). Much of what offset us in December was the blog relaunch. We're planning one article a week related to our space. We've done two articles so far (negotiating and personal branding), and both have been picked up on various social news sites and other blogs.

Our SEO efforts have paid for themselves 10 times over as well. Search traffic has seen strong increases in the last few months.

Revenue

Without going into specifics, Emurse is paying it's own way and the bank account is growing. As of December 28th, this month has seen an increase of 29% above our average for total monthly user transactions. Bot filtering lowered our overall cost, and refinement in our very limited marketing campaign increased our ROI. Mix that with our increasing conversion rate, and we're left with a very positive outlook.

Not too shabby for a boot-strapped project that turned down both acquisition offers and repeated investment attempts in 2006. The future prospects for Emurse look bright.

Looking Ahead

We expect 2007 to be an even bigger year for our small company. There are a number of new features planned for the first quarter, including some long tested aspects of the site. We're finishing up a small beta test of something we're especially excited about (hint: it's on the share tab). We've written it, tested it, and rewritten it probably three times over completely based on user feedback. It's simple and to the point. No frills is actually a pretty tough thing to do ;)

There are also some completely off the wall, unexpected and unannounced features planned for 2007 as well. We'll be running a beta test for these, and if you'd like to join, simply drop us an e-mail at service@emurse.com.

One of the only criticisms we've seen repeatedly is the lack of spell check. With many of our users moving towards more advanced browsers that have spell check built in (FF2), this feature stalled in beta testing. I'm very happy to announce though that you will see spell check added in the next couple of days. You can also expect smaller feature releases, such as updated resume templates and hopefully a wide scale roll out of the hResume micro-format (premium templates already have it).

The first half of 2007 will be very active development wise, and we're very excited about the next couple of roll outs.

Thank you for supporting us.

Without the suggestions, criticisms or occasional pats on the back we would have undoubtedly gone insane. Our product is a user product, and we're extremely grateful for all the blessings that we've had this past year.

Can't wait to recap 2007 ;) And if you haven't already, Create an Emurse account!

Links:

• Jon Miller no longer CEO of AOL - I had the pleasure of meeting Jon Miller during the Netscape rewrite. He's a very down to earth, approachable guy who's vision for AOL was/is right on the money. I wish for him the best. We can only hope our new CEO stays the course on the transition. Calacanis touches on it a bit here.
• How to write a great resume - Hat tip to Marc Nathan for forwarding it along to me. Great advice.
• A Legit Pay Per Post - And a perhaps a better name.
  
• Have a great start up idea? - Solid stuff.
  
• TechCrunch reviews Confabb - Web2.0 version of Meetings Connect? Sorta kinda. Maybe.

This past week, we rolled a whole new set of statistics out for web resumes.

Basically, it's everything you could dream of for keeping track of who, what and how people are viewing your online resume. We'll be adding a few more reports to the selection soon (like search terms), but the new 8 or so options should give people something to chew on for a bit. If there's anything in particular your looking for, drop us a note and we'll add it in. The engine was the work, dropping a new report in on a whim - eh.. not a problem ;)

Still cooking up those big changes in the kitchen. The first batch of cookies will hopefully be done in a week or two, the next one is a full on cake though, and will probably take a bit more time. Technology wise, we're pretty much all wrapped up. We're working on the work flow now though, which in our minds, is the most important part. Gotta keep that usability bar high ;)

College Football:

Amazing weekend for college football. 7 top 25 match ups, and the beginnings of conference play for lots of folks. It's also the UCF/USF game. USF had to return half of their 5,000 ticket allotment last week. For a "BCS" team that's simply incredible. UCF is 70 miles down the road. I guess it shouldn't be a surprise. Their first ever bowl game in Charlotte only drew a couple thousand USF fans. Attendance tomorrow is looking like 45-50k at the Citrus bowl though, so, it shouldn't matter all that much. Good times regardless! Go knights.

Emurse:

We did an Emurse ad on Fark classifieds the other week. I'm sure many of ya'll have heard how effective they're supposed to be, as had we. It's also a great way to get negative feedback. I know that sounds crazy, but negative feedback is truly the best kind. The community over there is overly cynical towards just about everything, and our product was no different. Evidently, Mike Propst used a "template" for the web design and none of us know anything about usability ;). But alas, these are users that are "thankful that Fark has avoided the web2.0 craze". It took me 15 minutes to figure out how to create a new account so that I could respond. Gotta love the irony, but to each their own. The take away from that is there may be a brewing backlash to the design trends as of late.. I certainly wouldn't doubt it -- buzzwords and trends all have a life span. Thankfully, Mike's amazing at what he does and our site is now completely skinnable in about 25 minutes.

Anyway..

Here's the traffic details from that $100 ad - about 386 clicks, which means a rock bottom ~0.25 cents a click. The thing is, it's not clicks we're after, it's actual conversions (signups). For comparison, Google will bring in let's say, 25% of that 386 for the same overall price on our keywords, but the kicker is we'll convert anywhere from 30-60% depending on the day of the week. Fark? A ~3% conversion rate ;) In the end, we'll get 3-4 times the number of new users via targeted advertising on Google than on Fark. It won't show up that way on a AWStats or Sitemeter graph.. but.. Yeah.

We'll keep exploring various sites and methods (on a strict budget) to see if we can find hidden gems.. but man.. Google is just straight up effective (then again, I remember the days when a 3% conversion rate would have been overwhelming positive.. and for some sites, it still might be.. I guess.)

Links:

• Alcohol use boosts income
• Giving usability methods the critical eye
• Are your employers leaving? The Unintended Consequences of Shining Up that (virtual) Resume
• Lessons Learned From a Job That Sucked

Last night was a blast. In the evening, we had the opening night networking event down by the pool. I had the pleasure of meeting Jason from Recruiting.com (owned by Jobster). It was great to be able to put a face to the name. Good people over there and a great blog. There was a silent auction going on. I bid $1.75 on a $1000 minimum TV. I figure I'd pull an eBay, being we're a bootstrapped start up and all. At the time, it seemed kinda funny. Must have been the free drinks. I didn't met the reserve, I'm told.... ;)

We ended up hanging out with our friends from GetTheJob.com and OnTarget over some sushi. Workshops are great and all, but that type of thing is what conferences are all about. Tonight, we'll be stopping by a few parties, including Indeed.com's, who we're big fans of, and whose API currently fuels Emurse's job postings.

Today we sat in on a couple of the workshops; Legal issues in HR, interviewing techniques and tools, and four trends that you can't ignore. The last of which, given by Jason Warner from Starbucks, was outstanding.

The four trends in recruiting Jason mentions are focus on Retention, Transparency, Convergence, and "Flatism." With Transparency, it's all about blogs and social networks. People are going to talk about your workplace, so you might as well accept it. This of course, is one of the driving factors behind Jobster's approach, and something that is likely to continue gaining traction. The need to be authentic and open is of increasing importance (don't fire people for blogging). Convergence is all about the Business Week article from awhile back entitled Math Will Rock Your World. HR needs to catch up organized, mathematical approaches that many other business aspects are employing, Tools, analytics, statistics -- data mining altogether. Finally, "Flatism" is about globalization. The example here is of course the book The World is Flat (fantastic, by the way).

I'm not sure if we're going to come back tomorrow. There are a couple other people we still haven't touched base yet, but there will be more opportunities in the future. We came here with a specific agenda and seeking specific information/knowledge. I think in that way, it's been a success. Good times fo' sho'.

Today's Interesting Links

• Fred Wilson Says Try Before You Buy - He speaks from a VC's perspective, but from a small start up's perspective, the same is true. Try before you sell. I think he's right on the money.
  
• Recruiting.com has a new look - Fancy. A little different with the Scape/Digg thing going on, but a much cleaner look. If they had ads, I'd click them. ;)
  
• Seth Godin Spoke at ERE today, Here's his presentation at Google - Seth's a great speaker. We missed him this morning (lots of real work to do), but theres been a buzz all day surrounding his presentation.
  
• Referral based HR - Zubka's a pretty neat site we had the pleasure of talking to out here. Check `em out!

• Host multiple resumes
• Optional e-mail alerts when a resume is viewed
• A new HTML badge for your pretty little website
• Hide specific aspects of your Personal Information on different hosted Resumes
• 3 new Resume templates (alex.emurse.com for "Royal", at least, for now ;)
• *Tons* of template fixes and rendering changes (lots of stuff on the backend in that regard)
• New formatting code produces much better results, specifically on bulleted lists
• Lots more, but, thats the really interesting stuff, and my ADD is something awful right now... ;)

We've also quietly (we haven't officially announced anything yet) built in the structure for paid accounts. Accounts will be yearly starting at $25. Everything that was in the system for free before is still free (sans a small limit on how many resumes people can create). We will always maintain this free level of service, cause, really, everything on the web should have some level of free to it (in my opinion at least). If you like Emurse and you think we're doing a good job, please support us where you can!

I swear we didn't start Emurse to fill open positions at Netscape. In fact, Emurse existed before Gavin and I were even a twinkle in Weblogs, Inc's eye. Gavin used the Emurse organization tools when he was undergoing that same job hunt.

But it is kinda nice.

People were posting resumes, and well.. I just happened to be looking for a special new someone at Netscape. I saw one particular resume link float to the top of the popular list, and it looked like a perfect fit.

Welcome aboard, Chris.

It's going to be fun.

Create new sections based off our existing resume templates.

Easily, the number #1 requested feature was the ability to create custom sections. Now, you can add a section, and rename it to whatever you'd like. Effectively, it's like creating your own sections on the fly.

Over time, we'll iterate on this some more and bring it even further around. The underpinnings of the site are extremely dynamic and we can expand in infinite directions. We should be able to pull off some really neat things in the near future :)

Keep those suggestions coming!

We intended to do it a long time ago, it's just been one of those things.. Do we write a flexible template engine? Or do we write about writing a flexible template engine on a blog that no one's reading?

Well, now, we have a flexible template engine, and people are reading.

So, really, there's no more excuse.

Follow along at home, leave your feedback, and be the first kid on the block to subscribe to the rss.

Exciting times are ahead.

Click here to Read the Emurse.com Blog

Podcast Interview:

First, last night I had the pleasure of doing my first podcast interview. Reid Morrow is a really bright college guy out of Colorado. He's a part of a entrepreneur blogging network called Mind Petals. The interview came out pretty well I think, skype either makes me sound like I have a much deeper voice than I do, or all the late nights have made me more of a man. I'm not sure yet. Either way, check it out and spread the love. Reid and the network he's on are going to do great things I think, as it's a topical, interesting subject matter and has a great college focus.

Traffic and Link Love:

So, anyway, Rafe Needleman wrote about us on his Web2.0 blog last night, which was just... awesome, to say the least. Next thing you know Wayjer posts it on digg sometime today (I'm not sure if I should thank Wayne, or slap him ;) j/k, thanks man!).. and well.. The cycle continues. Back on delicious and all over the blogosphere. The traffic we've encountered today is already about double what it was yesterday, which was a record day. We're having trouble keeping the servers going full speed, so, apologies in advance ;) Say a pray for server red, little guy is working his ass off.

We also finished the code for resume reviews late last night. We're going to do some testing on it and release it has a "preview release" (beta's soooo 2005). We're going to launch with paypal as the payment method, which I'm sure people will tool on us some for. But the fact is, it's incredibly easy to drop on and get going. We'll work out a more professional payment method shortly (already have tons of merchant code from the Atqui.com days), just want to research it properly and make sure we're getting the best rates. We'll go ahead and bend over for paypal for the shortterm. Expect resume reviews soon.

Here's a list of some of the coverage that's sending in the most traffic (in no particular order)

http://www.solutionwatch.com/442/emurse-resumes-improved/
http://news.com.com/2061-12572_3-6093492.html?part=rss&tag=6093492&subj=news
http://www.postbubble.com/2006/07/12/emurse-yourself-into-the-job-market/
http://del.icio.us/url/d4b3a198bb312aa10cb2c5a20716c89c
http://www.emilychang.com/go/ehub/app/emurse/
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/an-online-resume-service.html
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2006/07/11/emurse-resumes-web-2-0-style/
http://digg.com/software/Emurse_Create_and_Track_Your_Resumes
http://screeniac.com/2006/07/02/emursecom/
http://reidlevy.com/2006/07/13/reid-levy-interviews-emurse/
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/jobs/emurse-your-resume-186939.php
http://cssmania.com/galleries/2006/07/12/emurse.php (Mike's design skills got a 9/10 -- wow!)

More to come later, I'm sure :)

Keep spreading the love, we're working our ass off on this side!

UPDATE: The document conversion feature is a beast on the server under this kind of load. We're turning it on and off as we navigate through our traffic patterns -- it's temporary though, I promise ;) Working to get new hardware *stat*.

"I love the free resume creation, but I still go to monster because I can search and apply to jobs through their website, but if you guys offered that, I would go stright through you guys every time!" (note: it's coming)

"Resumes constantly have to be revised and reformatted for various purposes. This seems to be the easiest way to organize the process I ever heard of. Good job."

"Allowing users to create urls to thier resumes is pretty cool. I could see how that would be a popular thing."

"I think it is great idea. Sort of like a 'myspace.com' for job seekers. Just sorry I did not think of it."

"No kidding! What a great way to post a resume! Particularly like the variety of styles that can be used. My compliments to the Chefs!"

If you can't tell these are all from Emurse.com, and not from my other project, where "PLEASE STOP VOTING ON MY eMAIL" seems to be the common theme of recent feedback (about, 7,000 times and counting...)

Celly posted our resume builder to beta.netscape.com right before the cut over. We may have been one of the first websites to truly get an idea of the "netscape effect" (as we were in the number 1 spot at the first 9am rush). Granted, netscape had some server issues that probably prevent us from taking on the full load of the PR-9 website, but dang.. For little old Emurse, it was quite a bit of traffic.

The day before Netscape, we were averaging about 4 sign ups a day. Yesterday, we had 710 sign ups (that's more than a 10% conversion rate). Today, we've had about 20 so far (it's noon, and we're no longer on the front page). Someone saw it and posted it to digg as well (by directly copying the netscape description.. nice). We're getting shout outs on different blogs around town, listed as a web2.0 service on buzz sites. Google went from finding 170 refrences to Emurse to 298 this morning (though, we did do a press release to boost our SEO not that long ago).

Granted, it's still small time, but for a sunday type of project, it's showing some great promise. Here are some tastey graphs. Unfortunately, I haven't downloaded the logs yet, so their relatively primative.