This article is going to be different from the other Wozber Magazine posts. It's an open letter to our beloved users with the goal of sharing how we run Wozber, our vision, and our actions to help the Wozber community and services keep growing.
Our road through different business models
As you know, Wozber Resume Builder is entirely free to use, but that wasn't the case all the time.
Back in the inception of Wozber, it all began as a fully premium service that required to buy access during the signup process. There was no free way to build a resume with Wozber at all. As you can imagine, it hurt our growth big time.
So, we started experimenting with various freemium business models, compiled from the most popular resume builders in the industry and their revenue streams. The usual suspects were paid limited PDF downloads, watermark removals, premium templates, style customization, content length limitation removals, unlimited resumes and cover letters, etc. You get the picture. These models were the most successful in our industry, but after testing them all, we didn't find any success in any of them – our users didn't see enough value, nor did we.
We knew that we needed a better way of developing a business around Wozber – to find a way that would be fair to our users. A model that would add real value by making the job hunt process easier, faster, and, most importantly, leading users to more job opportunities. So, we began from a blank slate.
First, we started looking at Wozber from a different perspective and perceiving it as more than just a resume builder. We envisioned a platform encompassing multiple solutions towards boosting the chances of landing the desired job. A basic resume at its core is essential, but it's only a part of the answer to the bigger problem, the first step in the process.
Once we saw that, it all became clear what we needed to do to deliver a fair balance of free and paid functionality. We opened up our Resume Builder as s service available entirely for free without any limitations. Fast forward, this change, together with features we developed down the road, helped us attract more users in one year than during all years before combined.
The free resume builder opened the door to additional services that users might need once they have the initial content ready. The real beauty of such a structure is that it enables you to create a resume entirely by yourself for free, and only if you need help or want to improve your resume in some way, only then you might need to buy additional services. We think that this kind of business model is fairest for job seekers and offers a measurable contribution to their success.
Our first paid service in awhile
After we had the core free services ready, our first paid service in mind was ATS Optimization. Applicant Tracking Systems play an essential part in the highly competitive job market, and unfortunately, they are mostly misunderstood:
- 75% of mid/large companies use ATS.
- 70% of resumes get rejected and are not seen by the recruiters or employers.
- And just 2% of all resumes make it past the first candidate selection round.
To be invited for an interview, you need to have a well-written, tailored resume that matches the job requirements using the exact key information found in the job posting.
You can do it by comparing your resume to job requirements constantly by yourself. However, if you want to apply to many different job positions, we believe our ATS Optimization can make the process easier, more streamlined, and save you a massive amount of time.
ATS Optimization has been in open beta testing mode for a while now, and we're super happy to announce that as of today, the beta testing is over, and it officially becomes our first paid service.
It improved a lot during the past year, and we want to thank all Wozber users for that. We believe that this service will be a secret key to many job seekers' success.
What has improved during the Beta testing?
For starters, it grew from a simple highlighting of single type keywords of text into a full-featured service that can immensely improve chances of landing a job.
During the year, we added:
- Realtime ATS scoring, showing how well your resume matches the job requirements.
- Main keyword extraction of hard/soft skills, languages, certificates, and job title.
- Job text categorization for experience, education, and common requirements.
- In addition to full English support, we added basic functionality for German and Lithuanian languages as well.
- Accuracy improvements.
Entirely new as of today's launch:
- Analysis History, enabling you to access all previously analyzed job requirements.
- Irrelevant text exclusion for automatically detecting which parts of the text are job requirements, and which parts should entirely be ignored. For now, this feature works only in English.
- Expanded keyword usage stats, showing how many times every distinct keyword was used in your resume compared to job requirements.
- Pre-analyzed examples for various job positions.
- Further tweaks and fixes for performance and accuracy.
Rest assured, this is not the finale of what we have planned for the ATS Optimization. We still want to improve many aspects of the service, so you will keep hearing a lot from us.
Why does Wozber need to have paid services? Can't it all be free?
We looked for different ways of how it could be done, but since we're a small team of only two people who work full time on Wozber, all the solutions to keeping Wozber evolving and staying the best in the industry required a constant revenue stream. While users had access to all Wozber features for free, keeping everything online wasn't free for us at all: servers, software tools, and services – they all required constant financing.
Even without looking at running costs, to grow and keep improving Wozber, we need a viable business model. We are fully committed to Wozber, and we want to keep it that way for a long time so that we could bring you the best solutions possible – free and paid.
So, what happens now?
There are five most important things you should know:
- Wozber Resume Builder stays free without any constraints. Nothing changes here.
- ATS Optimization beta testing ends today and becomes a paid service.
- All existing and new users who create a Wozber account will get five custom job requirement analyses for free. Additional ways of getting more free analyses are coming soon.
- After the free tryout ends, one-month unlimited access to custom job requirements analyses will cost $29. If you're in a more competitive job market or not in a rush of looking for a new job, we will offer three months' access for a discounted price of $57 (you'd save $30 compared to a one-month plan). We want to note that this is not a subscription, as you pay only once for a time you need.
- Wozber is partnering with universities around the world to help students land the best jobs. All students from our partnered institutions get unlimited access to the ATS Optimization service for free until they graduate, so if you're a student, definitely keep this in mind. Follow instructions here to find out how to upgrade to the Education plan.
You can find more about the services and features they include under the Wozber Services page.
Thank you for helping us grow together
From day one, our goal was to make Wozber the best-in-class toolset for job seekers with the highest user experience, quality, and fairness standards. To have an ability to evolve and deliver you more and better features, we need to expand team-wise as well. Additional paid services are the key for us to do that.
We want to thank you for sticking with us, for recommending Wozber to your friends and colleagues. You are the ones who help Wozber grow.
From all the feedback we receive, 95% of our users unconditionally love Wozber. That's a huge number! In comparison, the other 5% enjoy it a lot and give us constructive criticism, helping us prioritize our planned features. With the changes happening now at Wozber, we hope that this trend will continue and that our love story will just get stronger :) So, once again, thank you! We love you all!
P. S. If you have any questions about these changes, feel free to get in touch with us anytime at hello@wozber.com.
