One of the requirements for the Career Fairs was a resume made through VMock that met a base score. I’m going to let the other writers handle the Career Fairs themselves. I instead want this to be focused on the experiences of VMock, a resume analysis tool. I’ve broken this down into four sections: the good, the okay, the bad, and the ugly.
First, the good: This does take less time to handle than sending your resume to Career Services for approval. It took only a few seconds, rather than a week or more of non-response.
Additionally, VMock had no issues with the format “[legal first name] ‘Avery’ Watson”. This is generally considered perfectly acceptable in professional contexts, given “Avery” is the name I use publicly, but has been something I’ve had issues with for years through Career Services. I am actually extremely happy about this.
Next, the okay: As with Career Services-approved resumes, VMock has issues with more uniquely formatted resumes. While I acknowledge that there are some resumes that are just unreadable, there is value in unique layouts. For instance, as an architecture student, a resume is a tool to show off design skills as much as anything else. So long as something is still readable, there’s nothing wrong with it not just being a bunch of horizontal rows (which is what VMock was recommending to me). That said, VMock didn’t require adherence to this format to score your resume, so I’m considering this okay.
I want to say that, for the record, I did really try to find something good to write about. I didn’t want this to be just me listing all of the issues I found. This was the best I could find.
Third, the bad: My main issues in this area were high-level concerns about usability principles generally, but I will go into further detail on some of my specific problems.
While VMock uses a scoring system to determine a resume’s value, there’s no rubric or target goals (at least on the user side). I’m going to break down my starting score on specifically the “Presentation” section. I started with a 12/30 on the presentation section, with subsections “number of pages” and “essential sections” being labeled “good job”, “spell-check” being labeled “on track”, and “overall format” and “section specific” being labeled “needs work”. Now, logically, I would assume that there are five subsections, each worth six points, totaling to 30 for the section, and that I get the points when I get a section to “good work”. That’s wrong, apparently. According to VMock, if I fixed the issues in “overall format”, I would get 17 of the possible 18 remaining points for the section. This to me indicates that there is something of a weighted score, which means there is a rubric, but I don’t know what it is. I can’t actually see what the target goals are.
There’s no opportunity for live feedback. All VMock will say is to “use less filler words” or “use less personal pronouns” or “use more action words”. But how do you do this? What’s the goal? Why shouldn’t I use “my” when describing my experience? These are things that I could ask a person for advice on, but I can’t ask VMock. If I don’t understand why I’m doing something, it’s going to be harder to do well at it.
Another more high-level concern in this area is the perpetual concern about leadership and experience. I get that experience is the most important thing on a resume. But it’s the recurring issue of “an entry-level position with at least five years of experience”. VMock repeatedly told me I didn’t have enough, but I put everything I had on it. But with leadership in particular, I don’t even know what it was looking for. VMock correctly identified five areas on my resume that demonstrated leadership experience, but that wasn’t enough. This goes back to the lack of human response. What did I do wrong? Why isn’t this enough?
I also tend to think that VMock unfairly conflates professional language with corporate jargon. I’m going to explain that in a separate article – that won’t be short, and this article is already too long to do that conversation justice – but those aren’t the same thing. VMock doesn’t seem to acknowledge the difference between them.
There were a lot of other concerns I would label as “bad”, but I am going to leave this part of the article here. Fundamentally, most of my concerns boiled down to one of these four: clarity in what goals are, lack of personal communication, unreasonable expectations, and corporate jargon versus professional language. Overall, these represent most issues I found.
Finally, the ugly: This is an area I have exclusively reserved for issues that VMock just objectively got wrong. While in the past some of these issues could boil down to personal disagreements in writing or organization style, there is a true answer to these. This is not an exhaustive list, but these are things that stood out to me in particular.
Going back to my commentary on VMock’s lack of personal responsiveness for a moment, I mentioned how VMock said not to use personal pronouns. It listed “there” as a personal pronoun. “There” is a pronoun, and depending on usage, can function as a demonstrative, reflexive, relative, and sometimes even interrogative pronoun. However, it’s not a personal pronoun. While we’re at it, “my” is a possessive pronoun, not a personal pronoun either.
VMock said the phone number should be listed in the format “(XXX) XXX-XXXX”, “XXX-XXX-XXXX”, or “XXX.XXX.XXXX”, and marked me down for this. I’m not doxxing myself by including my phone number in this article, but it was in the format “(XXX) XXX-XXXX”.
VMock said that past experience should be listed in past tense, while current experience should be listed in a blend of past and present tense, depending on the issue, and marked me down for inappropriate use of present tense. I actually fully agree with this understanding of tenses – which is why my resume is exclusively in the past tense. There is no present tense, because I have no current experience listed on it.
VMock performed a “Font Size Check” to find inconsistencies in font sizes and flagged this as something that I did wrong. The highlighted text sections all had the same font size. I don’t know how there could be inconsistencies when all sizes are the same.
VMock noticed two spell-check errors on my resume. Both were the correct spellings of specific applications that I have experience in. VMock also did not accept me trying to add these to my personal dictionary to avoid them getting marked as misspelled.
VMock performed an “action word” check for words that have specific actions associated with them. Now, I have issues generally with this check (what does it mean for something to be “more active”), but this section is about objective falsehoods. One of these action word checks recommended I use the word “dealt” in a certain section. That section opened with the phrase “I dealt with customers…”.
VMock also lacked internal consistency. During the “essential sections” subsection, VMock indicated that a portfolio should be included in the resume. Another area of VMock said I did a good job for not including images and graphics. If I included my portfolio, I would be including graphics. I can’t meet both of these goals.
VMock just won’t tell you what you need to improve on. At one point, I got the “Competencies” section to 29/30 possible points. I went through every tab in that section, and it listed nothing to improve on. Now, I do respect the idea that “there’s no such thing as a perfect score” when it comes to writing, where subjectivity comes into play. That said, I got a 30/30 in “Presentation” eventually, so that’s clearly not the case. VMock found something wrong (or at least that could be improved on) and didn’t say what it was.
This all had me wondering: what exactly is VMock, anyway? It’s one thing to have corporate jargon. And in all honesty, the longer that trans and non-binary identities are in the cultural forefront, the more I realize people don’t know what a pronoun is. The graphics one isn’t great, but those were in very different areas. People forget what they said earlier sometimes, so maybe whoever programmed it made an honest mistake. But I couldn’t move past it telling me to use “dealt” when I was using “dealt”.
So I looked into it. Career Services described it as an online resume creation tool. VMock describes itself as a “career acceleration platform powered by artificial intelligence”. And suddenly, all of the issues made sense. This is just a very bad attempt to use AI to solve real-world problems. And it does not work.
Were there mistakes I had in my resume? Sure. I won’t argue that. I think we can all find areas to improve on in any type of writing. Was VMock what ended up helping me to fix it? No. To address the concerns that VMock raised, I ended up doing additional external research. This tool just showed that AI doesn’t know grammar.