FOUNDER STORY

My name is Bogdan Zlatkov. I’m a Telly award-winning content creator who has worked with some of the top companies in Silicon Valley including LinkedIn, AdRoll, Prezi, Guidebook, and a dozen more.

But this wasn’t the case just a few years ago.

In 2016, I decided to not only change my job, but my entire career by going from the film industry into tech.

As you can imagine, this was an incredibly stressful process. I had gained so much experience over my career to that point, but now I was starting from scratch.

My resume had no relevant experience.

I didn’t know anyone in the industry.

And I didn’t even know which companies to apply to.

I spent the first 6 months doing what most people do: fiddling with my resume, updating my LinkedIn profile, applying to job after job and waiting to hear back.

Nothing changed.

I was quickly running out of money and getting desperate to find a job.

I even became an Uber driver to pay my bills while trying to get my new career off the ground

In my desperation, I began getting creative, trying new approaches, new websites, and completely new strategies.

And then one day an email popped into my inbox.

They wanted to bring me in for an interview!

Success and 🍾 followed!

...or so I thought.

I went on my first interview at my dream company and... I blew it.

Months of applying had just gone down the drain. I couldn’t understand why. I knew I was qualified for the jobs I was applying for, but I still wasn't getting many replies.

There was also this new software that I kept reading about called an Applicant Tracking System (ATS).

A lot had changed in the 7 years that I had been fully employed. I began to realize that applying to a job and actually doing that job are two completely different skills.

I decided I needed some feedback, so when I got my next interview I decided to film myself during the interview.

What I saw next wasn’t pretty.

You can see my very first video interview practice session in my interview course: Interviewing for Introverts

I was SO bad.

This is when I started doing what most people never do: I started testing my job applications like I tested my marketing campaigns.

I began testing everything.

To test my LinkedIn profile I did A/B testing on my headline, my about me, my experience, my job titles, my descriptions, my achievements, my publications.

I even tested what the most efficient desktop screen setup would be to maximize how fast I could apply to jobs:

My desktop setup that allowed me to apply to 15 jobs per hour, with a custom resume for each.

All this was helpful, but I wanted to take it one step further.

I needed more data.

Whenever I got a rejection letter (which was about 90% of the time), I would reach out to the recruiter who rejected me.

Again, most people never do this.

I would ask the recruiter why my application was rejected and I would push them to provide me more detail than, "it wasn't a good fit."

Why wasn't it a good fit? What on my resume stood out? How would you improve my resume? What do you, as a recruiter, look for in a resume?

Not every recruiter would reply, but a lot did.

I even asked some recruiters if I could grab coffee with them to learn more about how their job works and what they would recommend.

This is the coffee shop where I would meet with recruiters to get their feedback

I would also call the recruiters after our interviews and ask them for advice. One time I had one recruiter tell me point blank:

"Well right now I spend about 1-minute reviewing a resume, but I hope as I gain more experience that I can get that down to 30 seconds." - Top-Rated Recruiter

30 seconds?!

Here I was crafting the most beautiful, eloquently written resume in the world and it was only being seen for 30-60 seconds?

I dove a little deeper into this and after some research I discovered that it's even worse than this. According to multiple studies, on average recruiters spend just 10-30 seconds on a resume before they make a yes/no decision whether to pursue the candidate any further.

Here is a synopsis of the studies:

Click to Enlarge

You can read some of the studies for yourself here:

TheLadders

LinkedIn

Inc

Time Magazine

Now, I personally think that 6 seconds is an exaggeration, but the main point I took away from these studies is that recruiters aren't spending minutes carefully reviewing my resume, they're spending a few seconds to glance over it.

Clearly the system is broken.

Lots of very smart, very capable people have tried to solve the broken employment system. From LinkedIn, to Monster, to Glassdoor, to Career Sushi, there are a ton of platforms that attempt to solve this problem.

Unfortunately none of them do.

So, since it doesn’t look like the system will be fixed anytime soon, if we can’t fix it, we need to work with it.

Over the next 14 months I systematically tested every aspect of the job hunting process.

First, I figured out how to find the correct keywords in a job posting so I can make sure my resume rises to the top of Applicant Tracking Systems.

Here is an example of the correct keywords you should pull from this job description:

I distilled my process of how to do this into a 3-minute video and a simple worksheet, which you can watch in the Accelerated Resume Course.

Next, I needed to figure out how to create a clean resume that would be easy for recruiters to scan through.

I tested a LOT of templates, but after 200+ applications I found 3 resume templates that work best. In the Accelerated Resume Course I added all three templates and included instructions on what to write in each section to make sure you keep it clean.

Here is what my resume looked like using my favorite resume template:

This template has been used by dozens of course students and has earned them over 100+ interviews

One of the hardest things to figure out was how to write strong resume bullet points.

Since I know that recruiters will only be looking at my resume for a few seconds, I knew that my bullet points had to be short and punchy.

I created a proprietary system (called the 4-3-1 rule) that teaches anyone how to write great bullet points in less than 5 minutes.

I developed this system based on the methods I learned during a program I completed at Stanford University.

"Philosophical Foundations of Education" taught me how to break down complex concepts into simple techniques.

I tested the system by doing hours of resume revisions for my friends and family who were experiencing the same problems I was.

The main challenge they had was how to fit all the rich experience they had from their career into a one-page resume.

After a few months of doing this, I started noticing some patterns that kept coming up in their resume bullet points. Eventually I turned these patterns into a bullet point color-coding system.

Here is a short video from the Accelerated Resume Course that shows you the  color-coding system:

Before I learned these techniques I was getting about 1 interview for every 30 applications I sent (3% success rate).

After perfecting multiple resumes with these techniques I started landing interviews for roughly 4 out of every 10 applications I sent out (40% success rate).

I ended up getting my first Content Marketing job at Guidebook and later got jobs at Prezi, Adroll, and LinkedIn.

One of the core initiatives that they teach at LinkedIn is "The +1 Pledge." The pledge is an initiative for people who work at LinkedIn (who have so called "made it") to reach out into their communities to help those who are having a hard time.

I really like the idea, so I started doing workshops on resume writing at my local WeWork. I taught about 10 students per session and the feedback that I got was super positive:

The workshops were going great, but at a certain point my job at LinkedIn started taking up too much of my time so I had to stop teaching the workshops.

It was really sad not being able to help more people, especially since I knew how hard going through this whole process can be.

Then, one day I was walking through San Francisco listening to a Kevin Rose podcast and a lightbulb went off! What if I combined my previous skills in video production with my new resume writing skills?

I could record each of my lessons once and then an infinite number of students could watch them!

Every day after finishing my 9-to-5 job at LinkedIn, I would go home and spend hours drafting, scripting, and shooting each lesson.

I also created worksheets and cheat sheets that would help the viewer actually put the lessons into practice.

And that's what these courses (The 15-Min Cover Letter, The Accelerated Resume, and Interviewing for Introverts) are all about.

Each course takes the best of what I've learned from my 14 months of hacking the job application process and distills it down into short video tutorials and worksheets that can anyone can use to create a winning resume and nail their interviews.

I wanted to make sure everyone was happy with the courses so I also decided to make them all free!

That's right, all the courses are free and we are 100% donation based. If the courses help you, you can support our mission by donating here.

So that's the story of how this all came to be.

I hope that my painful experience means that yours doesn't have to be the same way.

Unfortunately, job hunting is a depressing affair no matter how you do it. It will make you feel under valued, under appreciated, and worst of all, purposeless.

Progress isn’t linear. You’ll have good weeks and bad weeks, good months and bad months. But when you get good and it finally clicks, you’ll see that you are valued, you are appreciated, and you do have a purpose.

Keep going, it'll be worth it!