Teal Resume Builder [Is It Worth It? A Recruiter’s Review]

Resumes

Jun 24

Trustpilot gives Teal a 4.4 out of 5-star rating based on 42 reviews. If you spend time on LinkedIn, you’ll see many influencers and recruiters talking about Teal like it’s the second coming of Jesus. Teal has a well-thought-out influencer and affiliate program, but is that all talk, or is it as good as they all say?

In full disclosure, I am a part of the Teal affiliate program, but my loyalty has always been to my audience over affiliates (which is why you’re probably reading this article right now). So today, I’m going behind the scenes of Teal’s Resume Builder and sharing the good, the bad, the ugly, and a fair assessment of what it excels at and where I think it misses the mark.

And ultimately, we’ll discuss whether or not it is worth the price to become a paying subscriber.

This is the most in-depth, independent review of Teal’s Resume Builder you’ll find on the internet, so buckle up!

A Walkthrough of the Teal Resume Builder Experience

First, I want to take you through an in-depth walkthrough of the Teal Resume Builder experience so you know what to expect before even signing up for a free plan.

When you first log in, it can be a bit overwhelming. Teal does a lot. But when you click on the resume builder, you’ll immediately be greeted by this pop-up.

If you have a complete LinkedIn profile, you can use that to shortcut your resume build. I chose to enter my information manually because I wanted the full experience and the ability to build from scratch.

After you select how you want to start building your resume, you’ll receive a 10-step tutorial showing you where everything is located and what each tool within the program does. It’s easy to understand and Teal does a great job with this.

Writing Your Contact Information

After the tutorial, you are prompted to review your contact information and make changes. Teal clearly built their software with everyone in mind and offers a lot of options for preferences and situations.

This is a good thing because it’s so versatile for everyone to use. But it can be a bad thing if you don’t know what to use and what makes the most sense for you.

Just because there is a field to enter information into, doesn’t mean you should use it.

For example, most people agree that entering your full address on a resume isn’t the best thing to do, but you’ll find a field to enter your full address within the Teal Resume Builder. Or you may be a marketer with a portfolio. In that case, you can enter the URL in the website field, but for most of us, we shouldn’t use that.

You have to know what fields make the most sense for you to use and the resume builder really doesn’t help in determining this.

I don’t view this as a terrible thing though. Teal is a tool and like any good tool should do, it gives you the options and flexibility you need to execute your vision.

Target Job Title

After entering your contact information, you’ll be asked to enter a target job title for the resume. I’ve built a few different target resumes using Teal including Receptionist, Dental Assistant, Marketing Manager, SEO Specialist, Staff Accountant, and a few more. I wanted to see if it works better for some than others.

But for today’s article, I went with something more mainstream (and what I thought would be easier to build), a customer service representative.

One of the things I enjoyed about Teal’s resume builder was that it updates a preview of the resume in real time as I enter information so I can decide if I like it or not. It also gives me another point of view to review what I’ve decided to write. Sometimes it’s easier to read the preview than it is a text box field.

AI-Powered Resume Summary

Once you move to the next section, the summary, the program offers you some guidance about how to write one. I thought this guidance was pretty good.

It tells you to get clear on your audience and include things like years of experience, notable industries, companies, core skills, and 1 - 2 accomplishments. It also suggests thinking about it like a teaser about what’s to come in the rest of the resume.

Will this guidance help you create a unique resume or separate you from your peers? Probably not. But I think it’s important to remember that’s not what you’re paying for here in my opinion. This is an AI resume builder. It should follow best practices and create a good resume.

You’re not hiring an expert resume writer with years of recruitment experience who can give you tailored advice. The fact that this program gives you any advice makes it much better than most resume builders out there. Most offer no advice.

The advice given by Teal is good advice that will apply to almost everyone. More importantly, it’s not harmful advice (yes, some resume builders I’ve reviewed just get it flat-out wrong).

I’ve been in a webinar with one of Teal’s VPs and I’ve exchanged messages with Teal’s CEO, David Fano. One thing I can tell you is that this group of people really cares and believes in their product. This is probably why they’ve gone out of their way to include advice that can work for everyone.

How Good Was the Summary AI?

Ok, we’ve covered that the advice is good. Let’s shift gears to the AI summary generator.

You get 2 AI-generated summaries for free, then you have to upgrade to a paid plan. So I tried it twice.

But before I could use the AI, it forced me to add my work experience. I thought this was genius. How can you write an effective summary without knowing my target job and the context of my background? You can’t and Teal understood this. I was super excited to see this.

After I entered some work experience, I went back to the summary to generate something. Now, before I share what it suggested, I want to preface this fact. I have yet to find a single AI program that can generate a resume summary that is even close to being workable, let alone used in my resume.

Here’s what Teal gave me.

This summary doesn’t even make sense. I’m applying for customer service jobs and I put that in my target job title earlier. But because my last job was working front desk at a hotel, it pulled that information.

If I was applying for the same job I had (front desk at a hotel), this might be workable, or at least it might be a starting point to build on. But let’s be real, most of us aren’t applying for the exact same job we have today. And if that’s the case, this feature isn’t usable at all. You’ll have to write your own summary from scratch.

Was I bummed? Yes. Was I surprised? No. As I said earlier, AI just doesn’t seem to be able to write resume summaries yet. It’s not just Teal.

Work Experience

When you start entering work experiences into the resume builder, you’ll also be met with Teal’s guidance on how to do so before you start entering information.

It will tell you things such as referencing previous names if the company was acquired and including start and end dates for all positions. This is good guidance for most people, most of the time.

Keep in mind that it doesn’t cover situations such as consulting for multiple companies. But remember, this is an AI resume builder. It’s still up to you to know how to use it and how to write a resume. It’s a tool to shorten the writing process, not to replace true expertise. And that’s the mindset you have to keep when using these kinds of resume builders.

Company Description Option

One thing I appreciated about Teal, which I don’t know if I’ve seen anywhere else, is that there is an option to include a company description. There aren’t any clear directions on how you’re supposed to use this field, but that’s probably because there are multiple styles of resume writing and this space allows for you to use many of them.

I used it to write a job summary, as you’ll find in any of my free resume guides. But you could also use it to give a brief description of the company and nothing more.

I really appreciated the ability to write a resume that isn’t straight bullet points. I know people write using only bullet points in resumes, but it personally drives me crazy. It’s not logically organized and lacks structure. I just find it to be a terrible way to communicate information. It reminds me of my random grocery list.

Work Experience Fields

Similar to the contact information section, the work experience section also has a lot of extra fields that I wouldn’t use in most resumes. Listing whether the job is full-time or not isn’t something I would recommend on a resume, yet it is an option. It’s not relevant information that you need to include.

I also don’t usually include locations for jobs because most of the time it too isn’t relevant and I don’t want to distract the hiring team with information like this. So again, you have to know what fields to use and which ones not to use based on your unique circumstances. Just because there is a field option doesn’t mean you should use it.

Another thing that bothered me was that if you select a field such as type for full-time or part-time employment, you can’t unselect it later. I had to delete the entire job and start over. That was really annoying.

AI Bullet Point Generator

Once you’ve entered a company and position, you can start writing bullet points. Again, the program will give you guidance when you start this part of your resume.

I’m not going to sugarcoat things, this is where I started to become a bit disenchanted with Teal’s resume builder. Teal has a unique style of building and suggesting resume bullet points and many times this style writes in a way that looks more like notes for an award speech than providing evidence that you’re qualified for the job you’re applying to.

Teal’s guidance examples read like this.

But I thought, maybe it’s just that the guidance section isn’t written the best. So let’s test out the AI ourselves.

You get 15 free AI credits to generate bullet points before you have to upgrade to a paid account. Here’s what it gave me.

I had some beef with these suggestions. Let’s look at the first one about resolving guest complaints and improving customer satisfaction and retention.

Here’s the problem with this. It doesn’t tell anyone I’m good at resolving complaints. It is a blanket statement that says, “Hey, I can improve customer satisfaction and retention by handling complaints, but I’m not going to tell you how I did that or show any evidence that I can do it. But trust me, I’m good at it.”

Maybe you improved by .00001%. I guess that’s still improved. Maybe the person who was in the job before me was so bad that I’m simply not as bad. There’s no context to help the reader understand the impact, let alone believe that you are good at it.

It would be better if it read something like this:

Decreased customer complaint escalations to managers by 20% through active listening, empathizing with guest situations, and finding fair compromises that made every party involved happy.

Now that’s someone I’d want to interview. They’ll make sure there are fewer complaints for the management team. I have a clear picture of how they go about resolving complaints and I know they’re not a pushover.

Let’s look at the next one about checking-in guests. Again, what is missing is how this is done. It’s not an award speech. It’s a resume.

It would be better if the AI suggested writing something like this:

Checked in X guests per day with an average wait time of X minutes by actively greeting each customer as soon as they walked in, prepping them for IDs while in line, and utilizing two check-in computers to process people quicker.

That person knows how to move a line, balance the guest service equation of friendliness and speed, and make use of their resources. I’d much rather interview them than the person with the AI example.

Now let’s be realistic for a moment. Do I expect the AI to write resume bullet points like these above? No. But I would expect it to be closer.

I haven’t used a Resume AI (and I’ve used dozens) that can write bullet points without editing them, but I have used some that get closer to the mark than Teal’s.

A good AI bullet point generator should offer you suggestions that prompt your brain to come up with relevant content.

Those bullet points should include examples of how something is done and put them in the context of the job you want and not your past job - not just add random metrics to your resume.

Not only did I find the bullet point structures mediocre, but I didn’t like the fact that Teal’s bullet point ideas were written for my last job and not my next job. What was the point of asking me about my target job earlier if it was going to give me resume bullet points that weren’t relevant to it?

I would have rather had the AI give me ideas about how I can find information for customers quickly, like when someone calls into a customer service call center. I would have rather seen content ideas about how I can handle X numbers of calls per hour with an average talk time of X when making reservations because that would also be relevant to a customer service job.

But I just didn’t get these things with Teal’s Resume AI at first.

Custom AI Bullet Point Generator

After you have Teal generate AI bullet points, you can select the option to customize them so I tried that to see if I could get better suggestions with some prompting on my part.

Teal gives you 3 options for customizing bullet points. You can enter keywords, use a job description, or use custom prompts.

I tried the keyword prompts and selected customer service-related keywords or skills that I knew people would ask for.

Here’s what it gave me with those prompts. I also hated the fact that I couldn’t go straight to a custom prompt, you have to spend an AI credit on whatever Teal wants to give you first before you can customize it.

These new ones were much better and in alignment with the job I wanted, not the job I had. Could I use them as is? No, but I also don’t think that’s a realistic expectation of a resume AI.

These new bullet point ideas did get me started in the right direction with my content and I thought these were more workable. I finally felt like I was getting what I needed from a resume bullet AI program.

Next, I thought I’d try using the job description option based on a customer service representative job I had added to Teal. When I linked the job, it gave me several responsibilities and requirements from the job listing and asked me to select one for the AI to write bullet points about.

I chose the customer complaint option under responsibilities because Johnny Rose has done a lot of that working at the motel. Here’s what it gave me.

Again, while all of them are about customer complaints, one and three lacked any context about how I achieved those numbers. Number two was probably the best suggestion out of the three and I could do something with that one.

In summary, I found the keyword customization option to be the most helpful and generating workable content.

The biggest problem that Teal’s resume AI has right now is that it likes to shove metrics everywhere but fails to provide any context around how those metrics are achieved and that can leave an amateur writer struggling to come up with ideas for their resume.

Education

The next section you’ll be prompted to add information to is your education section. Like other sections, it too has a lot of field options and that doesn’t mean you should use them all. Many of us won’t need to include the location, GPA, field of study, or start and end dates for our schooling. Some may, but most won’t.

I appreciated that each educational item has a field for additional information. Many programs don’t have this. This lets you add things like being valedictorian or that you graduated Magna Cum Laude.

Certifications

If you have certifications, you can add them in their own section. My personal preference for someone like Johnny Rose who only has one degree and one certification would be to combine them into an Education & Certifications section, but you can’t have it all when using a resume builder. Separating them takes up a lot of extra room on the paper.

Skills

I loved the setup of Teal’s skills section. It’s the only one I’ve seen that allows you to add categories of skills and group them together on the resume. It can clean up this section and present your information very well.

Other Sections

I didn’t play around too much with the other sections, but it is worth noting that Teal can add sections for awards, scholarships, projects, volunteering, publications, and interests. Teal really does provide the tools for just about every situation you can think of.

Most of us won’t use half of these additional options, but for those of us who need them, they’re a great feature.

Ok, so that’s my entire resume content creation experience. Next, I moved to design.

Teal Design Tools

Teal lets you choose from 8 different fonts, all of which are excellent choices for resumes. And yes, there are some bad fonts for resumes. Teal has good options.

You can edit everything from line height to color, and date format. You can choose to left-align things, right-align things, center them, and a few other things with the click of a button.

You can even change how you want bullet points and separators to look in your resume.

In this tab, you can also reorder the resume. Let’s say you want to lead with your education and certifications because you’re a new grad or something, you can put that first instead of your summary or work experience. Being able to move sections is a big deal because you always want to lead with your most impactful information.

You can also rename section headings which is a game changer. I can call my skills section, Technology if I want to use it for only listing out tech that I’m proficient with. I can change my work experience to “Career Path”. Or I can even write a hybrid resume by changing Projects to something like “Web 3.0 Experience”.

When it comes to design and formatting, Teal does the best job out of any resume builder I’ve seen.

Resume Analysis

You have to upgrade to really use the resume analysis, but I’m not sure it’s worth it (at least not for this tool alone). Johnny Rose had a resume score of 80%. The issues it brought up were kind of silly like I didn’t include a LinkedIn profile URL in the contact information.

It’s hard to do a blanket analysis on resumes like this because a lot of it depends on the individual and their job search goals. Someone like Johnny doesn’t need to create a LinkedIn profile and add it because that will increase his Teal score. He works at a motel and is applying for customer service jobs.

Would it be nice to have a LinkedIn profile? Sure. Will it help him with his job search? Maybe, maybe not. Will it make or break his job search success? No.

What Does Teal Do Well?

I think Teal’s greatest strength is its level of flexibility. Teal lets you build your way, not just their way. There are fields for everyone and almost every situation so you can build the resume that fits your needs. They don’t fit you into a box like many other resume applications do.

Here are the other areas where I also think Teal excels when compared to other resume builders.

They have the best design tools I’ve used and the level of customization is second to none for building a professional resume.
It’s easy to use and the resume builder is easy to navigate.
There are tutorials that provide good overall resume guidance.
The resume builder has a preview that updates as you enter information, making it easy to review and see how it looks in real-time.

Where Does Teal Have Pitfalls?

Teal Created an App For Everyone, Not For One Mainstream Community of Job Hunters

Teal is not without flaws. All that customization unfortunately comes at a cost. It can be quite overwhelming having so many resume options at your disposal in this program.

You have to have enough expertise to know which sections and which fields to use and which ones not to use. And yes, using all of them would hurt your chances of securing an interview in my experience.

Because there are so many field options, it can be a bit confusing for people to know what to use and what not to.

AI Is Good, But Not the Best

I’ve used a lot of resume AIs over the past year and while I think you can use Teal’s AI to help you, I would probably place them in second place for AI quality. The biggest problem Teal’s AI has is that the programmers over-focused on metrics and forgot to include context cues. In other words, it’s loaded with metrics but fails to suggest ideas on how you achieved that metric.

Sure sometimes it will give you ideas, but the ideas are too vague for most people to work with.

Are Teal’s Downfalls Specific to Teal or AI in General?

I think it’s fair to take an objective look at how much of Teal’s problems they themselves created and how much of it is just where some of the technology is today.

And the answer is, I think it’s a little bit of both. But first, let’s start with what I see across the board in all AI programs.

AI Generated Content Problems In General

I have yet to find a single AI that can write a resume summary that is workable. This is uniform across the board and is not unique to Teal.

AI Problems Unique to Teal

I’m not a programmer, but I’ve used other AI resume builders and some things Teal can control. They’ve programmed their work experience bullet points too heavily on metrics and not on suggesting ideas about how someone could have achieved that metric.

While I don’t think any AI is going to write a bullet point for you, I do think it should offer enough suggestions to trigger your mind to come up with great bullet points. Its job is to suggest content that you can expand on. Its job is to say, “Hey, if you wrote about these kinds of things, hiring teams would be interested in interviewing you.”

For example, take a look at Teal’s suggestions compared to Huntr’s for Johnny Rose’s work experience.

Teal

Resolved X guest complaints per week resulting in improved customer satisfaction and retention.
Checked in X guests per day with an average wait time of X minutes, ensuring efficient and positive guest experience.

Huntr

Implemented a new customer inquiry tracking system, reducing response time by 30% and improving overall efficiency when answering guests’ questions and concerns.
Increased loyalty retention rate by 20% through proactively following up with guests after visits and resolving concerns no matter how big or small.

Huntr was able to suggest bullet point ideas that were more relevant to the job I was targeting when compared to Teal.

Is Teal Worth Paying For?

Teal costs $29 every 30 days or $79 for 90 days. They also have a 7-day price option for $9.

This would be my recommendation for those who should consider purchasing Teal.

If you know enough about how to write a good resume and you want a way to speed up the process, save time, and make changes more quickly than using a resume template, I think Teal is definitely worth the price.

You also have to know that Teal is way more than just a resume builder. Inside of Teal, you’ll find a job application tracker, a LinkedIn profile review, a cover letter builder, a relationship manager to keep track of your networking efforts, and much more. So Teal is a great way to build a resume and keep everything organized, including which version of that resume you used when applying for jobs or sharing with your networking partners.

If you’re hoping to use Teal because you need ideas about what to write in your resume, I would choose a resume builder like Huntr over Teal for that objective. Teal Plus (the paid version) lets you do keyword matching, but matching keywords is a practice that’s debatable when it comes to effectiveness.

If you’re not sure if Teal is right for you, I would suggest trying it for free first. And then tell me what you thought about it in the comments below.

Teal Alternatives

Some other alternatives to Teal worth exploring include:

Teal Resume Builder Recommended Reading

Is Resume Nerd Reviews. Is It Worth It?

Receptionist Resume, Is Teal or Huntr AI Better?

Resume Writing: The Definitive Guide

Cole Sperry has been a recruiter and resume writer since 2015, working with tens of thousands of job seekers, and hundreds of employers. Today Cole runs a boutique advisory firm consulting with dozens of recruiting firms and is the Managing Editor at OptimCareers.com.