This is an article/list where I walk through my experience trying to re-write my resume using TealHQ. While there were a lot of things I liked, the pricing plan especially. But, it missed the mark for me on too many fronts.

Like most GenAI solutions, the sales pitch is over-selling. With GenAI improving daily, they have the fundamentals to be a hit eventually, but for now, it was not much more than an interesting experiment with high future potential.

If Google can get recommendations in Docs better, a little specific plugin for resumes will likely knock TealHQ out of the game. Maybe not, but the product doesn’t have a killer feature yet to help me stick around to wait for them to get better. I can do most of what I need in other products. And if Google’s Gemini keeps getting better, with longer context windows, TealHQ has a lot to overcome.

What is Required for Success: To make it better than just tweaking my resume with Google, the suggestions need to be more specific. I need more guidance and task-specific encouragement. The list of things to do, that I have struggled with for years could never make go away caused me to want to give in to the hallucinations. I also need next-level links to the job description so I can use the details in line when I have to override the hallucinations.

Goal: Create a slightly better resume, nothing too earth-shatteringly different from what I have already so that I can apply for a few roles and test out Teal's effectiveness. Here are the steps I took and my feedback.

This is the user journey as I experienced it. I have tagged each reaction based on Neutral Observation, Actions, Frustration, Fail, Wish List or Game Changer for quick skimming on your part.

1. Observation: It let me create a second resume without deleting the first.

2. Frustration: I can't create different kinds of experiences. I have professional and non-professional

3. Frustration: I can't control getting it to one page the way I can in Word/Doc but in the end, that might be a good thing.

4. Game Changer: It is really easy to keep things in my profile but hide them from a new resume type!!

5. Game Changer: Gave helpful feedback by each section item.

6. Game Changer: Payment. Let's me pay per week! And the toggle to make it one-time, not recurring, was clear and simple. If I get hooked, it will be easy to subscribe for a month or a quarter. This is a unique case of a product team pricing based on my needs, not theirs. If they nail it, I can easily subscribe and unsubscribe as I need it. (As a product in the same space, I wish Substack made this easier for me c to let my clients do. I hypothesize more people would be willing to pay for a week at a time. But I digress.) I had to pay to leverage the GenAI features to improve my resume based on their suggestions.

7. Observation: Started at a score of 45%. 16 Issues. let's see how I can improve that.

8. Action: Ignored the recommendation to put the desired Job Title as the subhead for the summary. I might put it back but not used to it a not sure I want it.

9. Action: Cutting word count on summary, per the second issue on the list. See video for experience. But I tried AI, it didn't work so well. They recommended I link a job description, so I did. (It is a job that is a bit junior for me, but a great test.)

10. Game Changer: When it provides a suggestion but doesn't know the numbers of what I owe it puts a placeholder XX in the text. This addresses my concern that it would make up stuff, and people would claim they did stuff they didn't.

11. Game Changer: I have 20+ years of experience, but it changed my blurb to 10 years to match the job description. For this application, I am going to go with most of what it suggests as part of the test. Let's see if it helps me get a recruiter call.

12. Frustration: I thought it had cut my 20 years to 10 years because it was matching the junior role, but then it auto-selected the VP role after cutting what was needed to meet the VP role. In today's language, we would say it needs a "larger context" window.

13. Frustration: Because my email is really long (school email that lets me name drop) AND I can't control the design elements, I wish I could use different emails for different applications. I am probably the odd man out, as they say because my email/name is soo long. But not the only one.

14. Frustration: I followed the instructions, but it still says there is a problem with my summary because its own AI generation did NOT meet the requirements it set: 300 to 350 words. Now, I have to find 101 word on my own to get back to the required suggestion. I consider this a HUGE failure of the product. Promising help, but creating more work for me.

15. Wish List: I wish it was easy to pick things from the job description and ask it to help me add them to my summary. Right now, to do that, I have to manually go back to the job description.

16. Frustration: Providing flags and notes, but it takes a bit to grok the issue, some are impossible, some as a professional I don't agree with. The "Show Me" only highlights the broad area, it doesn't properly suggest.

17. Game Changer: The feedback on each resume entry is about: number of achievements, success metrics, word count and time-based measures. These are all excellent and where most people fall down.

18. Frustration: For most of my roles, I like a brief 2 to 3-line descriptor that explains the scope; with TealHQ, I can't do that. This might be enough to make me not use the product. But I will apply to a few jobs with the output anyway to test.

19. Wish List: The problems are listed as individual, but actually, there are a few common patterns; I really wish the problems had been grouped and categorized so I could quickly see most of the real problems.

20. Observation: Some of the problems were created by the import and formatting limitations.

21. FAIL: It just hallucinated BIG time, turning an experimentation platform role into a creator role!!

22. Observation + Failure: I am getting tired of re-writing it and starting to accept suggestions that might not be 100% right but are increasing my score and making the list of problems go away. This is kinda like the person on a TV crime drama that just says yes to be done with it. This is VERY dangerous. If I am doing this as a test, I know I will submit for a role I am over qualified for; what must the average person be doing?

23. Frustration: I can't remove the list of skills. Leaving it as a test. But the toggle to hid this feature isn't there. So if I don't agree with it, I can't kill it. It doesn't give me the control I need. I will apply for a few roles as a test, but this isn't right for senior roles. Yep, ATS win but no proof that it is worth the gamble.

24. Fail: After re-writing my resume, when I went to apply, the sustem wanted me to fill in all my job experience manually. Since I had already filled it in, the amount of work to copy and paste my new resume in wasn't worth it — for this test. If I wanted a real job, it might have helped, but some of the info would have been lost.

The Video

Note: running into too many problems to keep listing everything as I encounter it.