Rezscore: Gerrit Hall, Sean Weinberg grow free, online, algorithm-based resume grade service [VIDEO]

Rezscore is simple, fast, thorough and free. That’s how the algorithm-based resume grading startup is going to own its corner of the online jobs market, says co-founder and chief operating officer Sean Weinberg.
It works like this: visit the website, upload a document version of your resume and let the service’s robust algorithm review it, evaluating word choice, layout, experience and more. No registration required: it’s sleek and just might offer you the kind of advice you’re seeking during your job hunt.
No direct competition in the instant resume grading for consumers exists to date, though LiveCareer is due to launch a competing product, Weinberg, 26, said, and products like LinkedIn, Klout and Grader.com are near enough to keep Rezscore growing.
Those growth plans include introducing industry specific algorithms, noting that a resume for a professor’s gig might need to look different than that for a graphic designer.
Still, Weinberg and fellow co-founder and CEO Gerrit Hall say they already have a rarity among online startups: a service that can actually help its users.


Rezscore launched at the end of 2010 with an early Lifehacker review, fully launching January 2011.
Hall and Weinberg had worked together on a smaller project before and hit it off.
“We both noticed very clear trends in what worked on resumes that seemed to be agnostic to region, experience level, industry and job title. There’s a way people market themselves that is successful across all boundaries,” Weinberg said. “So we set out to science it.”
The pair built a backend system where recruiters, HR people and hiring managers could go in and rate resumes on over a dozen different metrics, fine tuning the questions they asked all along.
“After a few months of harassing everyone we knew to grade resumes and then compiling the data, we discovered very clear trend lines that for the most part — although not entirely — backed up our assumptions about resume quality,” Weinberg said. “Then we built an algorithm to mimic our human reviewers thought processes in aggregate.”
They had a prototype by August 2010, tweaking before their launch late that year.
The startup is already bringing in some revenue, by way of resume editing and writing using data not included in its algorithm, affiliate links and some cost per application jobs matching, in addition to licensing its technology.
Rezscore is based in the Northern Liberties headquarters of the Adapt Technical Group, though CEO Hall lives in Brooklyn and Weinberg is in Cherry Hill.
For now, the service has only been funded by a friends and family round. The pair discuss other investment possibilities but nothing has fit quite yet, Weinberg said.
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Weinberg has the resume background. He was a recruiter right out of college, launched a professional resume writing service in early 2009 before starting law school at Rutgers-Camden that fall. In early summer 2010, he started working on Rezscore and is currently on leave from law school to pursue the venture.
Weinberg, who was born in St. Louis but grew up in Manhattan and attended Yeshiva University for undergrad.
Gerrit, 29, has the startup chops. He worked at Spoken Hub and Sonic Boom Games and was a co-founder of Groupable. He is a regular contributor to the startup advice site Bootstrapper, hosts the “Vital Topics” panel of the Road2Shambala podcast and spearheaded the 2log competitive blogging platform. The native of Seattle has dual degrees in physics and religion from Swarthmore.
So why does the startup have roots in Philadelphia?
“Initially it was just because I was in law school in the region. I was working from home in Cherry Hill but going out to a lot of the Philly events,” said Weinberg, noting that Rezscore was included in the first Open Angel Forum here and demoed at the Philly Tech Meetup. “We thought that actually having a physical presence here would make a difference towards us having a conceptual home in the community. I love how open the Philly tech community is while still being a relatively small/ tight knit group.”