Your Resume Is Only 27% Compatible (And Other Lies)

The tool didn’t lie. The person behind it did.

Joe Shachaf
May 06, 2025
02:26 pm

Prologue

I have a long career, spanning over a quarter of a century. I met people who influenced (or tried to influence) it during my career. Some were coworkers, some were managers or peers, and some were recruiters.

Naturally, during my career, my resume underwent many changes, edits, design changes, additions (and editions) and so on.

At one point, when I wanted to make a major change and push my career forward, I hired a professional writer to redo my resume. She was really good, and besides providing a stellar resume, she also guided me on how to keep editing if needed.

I also had tons of advice coming from recruiters. Some provided advice when the opportunity didn’t go through; some provided general advice.

I can safely say that I’m now quite comfortable with my resume.

How I was scammed (well, not really)

A couple of days ago, I was approached on LinkedIn by someone who presented himself as “An executive placement specialist”. His profile page suggested he is an expert resume writer and promised to provide “5x the number of interviews”. Apparently, I engaged with a poll he

published a few days earlier, and now he is interested in what I’m looking for and has offered to review my resume.

I’m always open to hearing feedback, criticism and ideas, so I sent him my latest resume.

He took the time—at least ostensibly—to “review” my resume and replied with the following image.

An image of the "report" sent by the "specialist"

The image was originally blurry. This is the original image, downloaded from the chat directly.

He included a long message filled with just enough buzzwords and semi-professional jargon to almost pass as an expert resume writer. The reply was 100% generated with AI and had zero influence from the individual himself.

AI verification by originality.ai

But the one thing in his response that immediately triggered my scammer alert was the numeric value: 27%.

My resume scored 27% in an ATS verification.

The thing is, I provide resume review and consultation for my mentees, and anyone I coach (or anyone who needs this service). And to do that, I use various tools, but more importantly, I use my little sister’s brain, as she’s truly a professional recruiter. While none of the tools scored my resume at 100% (as expected), none rated it below 75%.

I confronted the person. And like most scammers do, they blocked me.

The method

This person (and probably many others) works by publishing innocuous-looking polls, asking people for their work-related opinions or their career aspirations. They post in groups that give them credibility (we tend to trust the admins to filter spam; we are wired to think everyone in the group is “like us”). I answered one that asked about the ideal workplace (remote vs in-person) in a group that belongs to ACP, with which I volunteer. Then he contacted the poll’s voters with the opening line “I noticed you recently engaged with my post on job searching” (his opening with me).

So, what are you saying?

The takeaways from this story

LinkedIn is a professional social network. But it is still a social network, with everything that a social network brings. The benefits (e.g. genuine networking, job search, news) and the bad (e.g. scammers, predators, and so on).

There are two key points here:

Be vigilant about whom you send your resume to. While not private (mine is published online and is searchable), it usually doesn’t contain PIIS (Personal Identifiable Information), but it still gives quite a bit of background information.
Be even more vigilant about who you give money to, even in a professional setting and context. There are a lot of self-proclaimed “experts,” and your money is better spent elsewhere.

One more personal ethical point

Nowadays, the job market is difficult for everyone. Personally, I offer many of my services free (e.g. mentorship, preliminary resume review) or with a token price to aid those who really need it.

I find it very cynical to try to scam those who are already in a vulnerable position.

I have screenshots of the conversation, and the full name on the profile. I won’t publish them here for ethical and legal reasons. Feel free to contact me if you want to verify that you’re not dealing with the same person.

I also welcome comments and discussion. If you want to share something, please email me, and I will publish it (with your permission).