Resume Blaster is an Internet service heavily promoted to job seekers. It promises to send your resume to up to 4600 recruiters, selected by your job specialty and target geographic area. The recruiters join this service for free, by opting in. According to Resume Blaster, no email goes to recruiters who have not requested it; hence, this is not spam.
I found several things about Resume Blaster disappointing to the point of feeling like I was scammed.
1) Only after paying my fee was I told of the delay in "blasting" - in my case nearly a full business week!
2) Only after paying and blasting did I become aware that the recruiters emailed were not the targeted group that had been promised according to the "Recruiter Calculator".
3) My resume was sent to many companies that clearly do NOT handle my type of specialty. I am a manufacturing manager and many of the firms I was blasted to handle ONLY advertising, health care, trucking, insurance, finance, clerical temps, and other irrelevant (to me) positions. This, despite my careful selection of specialties relevant to me.
4) My resume was sent to many companies that clearly do NOT handle my geographic area. Again, most were trucking/banking/clerical outfits in the Midwest and East Coast, not the engineering and manufacturing firms from Silicon Valley that would be of interest. I made the correct geographic selection, but it was apparently ignored.
5) The list of "recruiters" is cluttered with non-existent, marginal, or non-recruiter names. I attempted to verify the existence of a sample of the recruiters my resume was supposedly sent to. Only about 40% could be verified to exist. Others were either demonstrably non-existent, or so sketchily named that they could not be proved to exist ("Management Resource", "engel", etc.).
6) Most of the email responses were "form" responses from recruiters inviting me to fill in one of their profile sheets with the exact same info I had so painstakingly entered into the Blaster profile. It took a lot of reading and research to determine which of these were actually worth replying to.
7) The time "saved" from not having to send out your resumes is fully eaten up my wading through the "auto-responses" disguised as real responses. (One recruiter used "I've seen your resume and I think I can help!" as the subject of his auto-generated email.)
8) Recruiters get these "blasted" resumes free - I am beginning to think that they take them as being about worth that much. It costs them nothing to sign up for the service, fire up their autoresponders, act like they are interested, and ask for 15 minutes of your time to re-enter all that resume info in their own specific format. 100 recruiters * 15 minutes each = 25 hours wasted.
9) The few interesting nibbles I got were from recruiters who did not read my profile, who wanted to offer me positions in Kansas, New England, North Carolina, and Texas. They must not have read the "No relocation away from Silicon Valley" part of my Resume Blaster profile. The lovingly crafted profile was hardly read even by their search agents let alone their eyes.
10) Upon becoming aware of how far short Resume Blaster fell of its promises, I requested a refund. According to their Web site "At ResumeBlaster.com, customer satisfaction is our utmost desire..." The sole adjustment offered was a 10% discount on a repeat run of Resume Blaster. I responded to let them know this was inadequate and they never replied to me.
As an effective alternative to Resume Blaster, let me suggest using the method that actually got me my desirable director position at a fast-growing Silicon Valley firm. I suggest finding lists of executive recruiting firms. These are readily available on the Web. Choose only the ones that actually handle your geographic area and specialty, and send them more tightly targeted and personalized emails, highlighting your marketable qualifications. Of course, attach your resume.
Stephen
San Jose, California
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