There is no reason today to use any other tool to build a resume. In the spirit of full disclosure I share a common employer with the founders of Emurse, Gavin Hall and Alex Rudloff. They have been asking for a while for any feedback, I finally set down and used the product - I'm very impressed.

Emurse takes the mechanics, layout, and formatting out of the equation and lets you focus on the content of your resume. The entire site has a logical hierarchy and task flow. AJAX and CSS have been layered into this product completely for ease of use and never get flashy or cumbersome.
!!continued!! A great use of CSS is the tool tips while building your resume. At first they might appear cheesy and annoying, but if you actually read them, you'll find they give some great advice. They help make you stop and think about what you are saying about yourself. It's as though Emurse has given you great tools to speed up the building of a resume, and then put up a flashing caution sign, "please take your time" -- well played.

One thing that could be improved is the flexibility of the resume output, there seems to about 10-12 topical headers that you can choose from -- I'd like to make my own heading "Geniuses I've Apprenticed With", but there doesn't seem to be a mechanism to do so. I also found a couple of areas where the formatting of the resume didn't work like I expected and I question why they would go with wiki style formatting (probably for ease of coding), that could easily chase away non-tech geeks who want to put their own tweeks on the content.

There are a ton of feature packed into this site, stats, hosting, email, web badges, I won't go into all of them, the ones I've already used have been very handy. Perhaps too many features, one set of screens that should be rethought is the public side of the statistics system. It is impressive, but only a real web log junkie like myself would understand that much of the raw data they are displaying are search engine spiders indexing your resume.

SEARCH ENGINES SPIDERING MY RESUME ? Let me say it again. This is fantastic. While most resume sites bury you behind memberships and make the recruiters pay large sums to access their databases. Emurse puts you in control of your distribution. If you want to be found, you will be. I found over 1000 Emurse resumes with a simple Yahoo search. Even if self promotion and high visibility are not your goal, the ease of switching styles, templates and outputs formats makes this the only resume building tool a savvy job seeker should ever use.

Special shout out to Mike Propst for a really crisp professional design, if you get a chance, a media kit with better buttons and badges would make blog post like this look a lot nicer. A great use of CSS is the tool tips while building your resume. At first they might appear cheesy and annoying, but if you actually read them, you'll find they give some great advice. They help make you stop and think about what you are saying about yourself. It's as though Emurse has given you great tools to speed up the building of a resume, and then put up a flashing caution sign, "please take your time" -- well played.

One thing that could be improved is the flexibility of the resume output, there seems to about 10-12 topical headers that you can choose from -- I'd like to make my own heading "Geniuses I've Apprenticed With", but there doesn't seem to be a mechanism to do so. I also found a couple of areas where the formatting of the resume didn't work like I expected and I question why they would go with wiki style formatting (probably for ease of coding), that could easily chase away non-tech geeks who want to put their own tweeks on the content.

There are a ton of feature packed into this site, stats, hosting, email, web badges, I won't go into all of them, the ones I've already used have been very handy. Perhaps too many features, one set of screens that should be rethought is the public side of the statistics system. It is impressive, but only a real web log junkie like myself would understand that much of the raw data they are displaying are search engine spiders indexing your resume.

SEARCH ENGINES SPIDERING MY RESUME ? Let me say it again. This is fantastic. While most resume sites bury you behind memberships and make the recruiters pay large sums to access their databases. Emurse puts you in control of your distribution. If you want to be found, you will be. I found over 1000 Emurse resumes with a simple Yahoo search. Even if self promotion and high visibility are not your goal, the ease of switching styles, templates and outputs formats makes this the only resume building tool a savvy job seeker should ever use.

Special shout out to Mike Propst for a really crisp professional design, if you get a chance, a media kit with better buttons and badges would make blog post like this look a lot nicer.