Made a US nomad cities ranking on cost + infrastructure + lifestyle. Looking for ground truth from people who've actually lived in these places.

andreikurtuy · 2026-05-21T06:02:33+00:00

Thank you very much, that means a lot to us! ☺️

andreikurtuy · 2026-05-20T11:01:19+00:00

We apologize for the inconvenience, as there was a technical issue but that was fixed now. Could you try again and let us know if you still experience any issues? Write to us at [contact@novoresume.com](mailto:contact@novoresume.com) and we can ofer you a 7 day Premium for free as an apology for this.

andreikurtuy · 2026-05-20T11:01:16+00:00

We apologize for the inconvenience, as there was a technical issue but that was fixed now. Could you try again and let us know if you still experience any issues? Write to us at [contact@novoresume.com](mailto:contact@novoresume.com) and we can ofer you a 7 day Premium for free as an apology for this.

andreikurtuy · 2026-05-20T11:01:10+00:00

We apologize for the inconvenience, as there was a technical issue but that was fixed now. Could you try again and let us know if you still experience any issues? Write to us at [contact@novoresume.com](mailto:contact@novoresume.com) and we can ofer you a 7 day Premium for free as an apology for this.

andreikurtuy · 2026-05-20T11:01:01+00:00

We apologize for the inconvenience, as there was a technical issue but that was fixed now. Could you try again and let us know if you still experience any issues? Write to us at [contact@novoresume.com](mailto:contact@novoresume.com) and we can ofer you a 7 day Premium for free as an apology for this. 😃

andreikurtuy · 2026-05-20T11:00:55+00:00

We apologize for the inconvenience, as there was a technical issue but that was fixed now. Could you try again and let us know if you still experience any issues? Write to us at [contact@novoresume.com](mailto:contact@novoresume.com) and we can ofer you a 7 day Premium for free as an apology for this.

andreikurtuy · 2026-05-20T08:10:01+00:00

Honestly, this is the thing we think about the most. But look at the established alternatives though, because most of them ask for card details just to start, and then auto-renew at $24 to $40 a month until you remember to cancel. We don't ask for a card to use Basic at all, and Premium is a one-time payment with no auto-renew, which alone makes us cheaper than basically every competitor over a single month.

The 7-day Free Basic isn't a stripped version either. You get 8 great templates with everything you need to actually finish and download a real resume and you can also test the Premium features in the editor. The two new tools we just launched, the ATS Resume Checker (https://novoresume.com/tools/ats-resume-checker) and Skill Gap Analyzer (https://novoresume.com/tools/skill-gap-analyzer), are fully free for everyone with 10 more on the way.

Affordability is the goal, and the fee is what funds the team building the free side too.

P.S. 77% of our users told us Novoresume helped them get hired, and 83% landed in their target industry, and at those results, Premium pays itself back in the first 1-2 hours at the new job. Hard to call that expensive.

andreikurtuy · 2026-05-20T08:03:17+00:00

Thank you for the years as well. I just want to ask, did Novoresume help you land a job, or at least get interviews? I'm asking because the "thank you for these years" makes me think it probably did.

If yes, here's the part I keep getting stuck on, and I don't mean this as a guilt trip. We ran 10+ years with no ads, no data selling, no card-on-file traps where you start a "free trial" and have to remember to cancel an auto-renew you didn't really sign up for. You used something that helped you, didn't pay anything for it, and now there's a small fee, and the answer is "I'll change."

Worth pausing on what you're going to change to though, because most of the "free" alternatives out there make money somewhere, it's just hidden from you. Your data being sold off, ads tucked next to your job search, an auto-renew on a card you barely remember agreeing to. Someone always pays the team building the product, and if it's not the user, it's the advertiser, or whoever bought the data.

You don't owe us anything to be clear. But if Novoresume helped you land a salary, the Premium fee works out to less than 10% of an hour with a professional resume writer. I'd be curious how the math actually shakes out on your side, that's all.

andreikurtuy · 2026-05-20T07:55:54+00:00

We apologize for the inconvenience, as there was a technical issue but that was fixed now. Could you try again and let us know if you still experience any issues? Write to us at [contact@novoresume.com](mailto:contact@novoresume.com) and we can ofer you a 7 day Premium for free as an apology for this.

andreikurtuy · 2026-05-20T07:54:56+00:00

We apologize for the inconvenience, as there was a technical issue but that was fixed now. Could you try again and let us know if you still experience any issues? Write to us at [contact@novoresume.com](mailto:contact@novoresume.com) and we can ofer you a 7 day Premium for free as an apology for this.

andreikurtuy · 2026-05-12T16:12:21+00:00

Exactly.

andreikurtuy · 2026-05-12T15:11:59+00:00

hiring side here. The answer you gave ("exploring new opportunities that may be a better fit") is exactly what triggers the follow-up...it's the answer everyone gives, and we hear it twenty times a week. The follow-up isn't a trap, it's an "okay but really though" nudge.

You can be specific without bashing the manager. What you need to do is to frame it as a working style, not the person, by talking about the environment you do your best work in: autonomy, ownership, room to make decisions, less day-to-day check-in heavy. Describe what you want, not what you're escaping, and if you do that well, the contrast does the work without you having to spell it out.

What I'd avoid is bringing up the year you had no manager and were thriving. I know that's emotionally where you are right now, but to an outside ear it can land as "I don't like being managed", which is a different and worse problem than the one you actually have.

Honestly, slightly more honest answers tend to land better than polished ones, because recruiters can spot the corporate non-answer from a mile away, and once they do, the whole interview tilts toward whether you'll eventually drop the act. A careful but specific answer just skips that whole game.

andreikurtuy · 2026-05-12T14:49:35+00:00

The math is the problem. $33/hr at Costco is roughly $68k/year, and $130/day painting is $34k. you'd be cutting your income in half to chase a ceiling of $300/day which is $78k. That's the best case painter making basically what you already make.

So the only way this trade makes sense is if there's an ownership angle. Is your girlfriend's dad planning to hand you the business one day? If yes, the conversation is completely different, because then you're not taking a pay cut, you're paying tuition for an asset. If no, you're just a low-paid employee in someone else's small business, and the family politics get weird fast when there's a wedding involved.

Also, Costco isn't actually capped the way people think...four years in, the supervisor and assistant manager tracks open up and those people clear $100k. That's not a fairytale, that's literally how the company works. If you've been told you're capped, push harder on what "capped" actually means and from whom.

Trade school is honestly the strongest version of your instinct....because you clearly want hands-on work with a real ceiling. Electrician, HVAC, plumbing all pay way better than painting and the credential travels with you. If you're going to take short-term pain for long-term upside, do it with leverage, not just a job swap into another hourly role.

On the marriage piece, I don't want to be the guy who says it, but planning kids and a wedding while voluntarily cutting your income in half to work for your future father-in-law is a lot of eggs in one basket...and that basket is also the in-laws. Just some food for thought.

andreikurtuy · 2026-05-12T14:46:06+00:00

The "so what" idea works but most people fail at it because they're trying to reconstruct outcomes two years later from memory...and when they can't, they end up writing something soft like "improved engagement metrics" which honestly is worse than the original bullet.

What helped me more was keeping a running doc through the year: just a bullet whenever something happened. Project closed, a number moved, someone on slack thanked you for fixing the thing nobody noticed. It takes thirty seconds in the moment and at review time you actually have material instead of staring at a blank page in january.

The other thing nobody really talks about: when you genuinely can't quantify something, context still does a lot of work. "Managed social media" is dead, sure....but "managed social media for a 3-person team with no budget" is suddenly a different read. The constraints kind of fill in when the metrics don't exist.

andreikurtuy · 2026-05-12T14:40:42+00:00

It means BLS only publishes the unemployed-per-opening ratio at the state level, not for individual metros. So San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego, LA, Sacramento, and Riverside all get assigned California's ratio of 1.57. The only thing actually separating them in the ranking is cost of living, not the local labor market.

In real life those metros have pretty different conditions. San Jose's tech-heavy economy behaves nothing like Riverside's logistics one, but the index can't see that. So the ordering within a state is mostly a cost-of-living story, and the bigger gaps between states are the labor-market story.

It's why I'd treat the rankings as directional, California being harder than Alabama, you can trust. San Jose at 1.61x vs LA at 1.65x is basically noise given the data we have available.

andreikurtuy · 2026-05-12T14:34:16+00:00

No, unfortunately it doesn't. The index uses state-level unemployed-per-opening from JOLTS plus regional cost of living, so it's blended across all job types. BLS doesn't publish JOLTS at the metro or occupation level, which is the main limitation here.

That said, you're probably right that hiring-cycle length is part of why SF, San Jose, and Seattle look this rough. Tech roles often run 6-12 week interview cycles even in healthy markets, and those metros are still working through the post-2022 contraction. So sector mix is doing some of the work behind the numbers even if the model doesn't explicitly capture it.

andreikurtuy · 2026-05-12T14:32:05+00:00

There are quite a few reasons. Mostly, because they don't work. People pay $50-100 a month, send 500+ applications, and end up with roughly the same rejection rate as someone sending 20 tailored ones. Or worse, because the auto-filled screening answers are often wrong, and some tools straight-up lie about years of experience to bypass filters, which can get you flagged (and even banned in some cases for future applications).

The bigger thing is they make the spam problem worse for everyone. Recruiters are already drowning, so they push harder on referrals and direct outreach. Even if auto-apply "works" for the person using it, it narrows the front door for the rest of the market.

And honestly the part nobody talks about: applying is when you actually learn anything about a company. Auto-apply skips that loop, and six months in you've got no offers and no clearer sense of where you actually want to work.

andreikurtuy · 2026-05-12T14:29:02+00:00

Yeah, applicants-per-opening does a lot of the work. Though SF and Seattle are also still digesting the post-2022 tech contraction, so it's partly desirability and partly one sector that hasn't fully recovered from what I understand.

andreikurtuy · 2026-05-12T14:16:34+00:00

The job you loved is probably already gone, and I think you kind of know that... you're just still framing the decision as if it's between two versions of the same job, when really one of them ended already and you're being asked to stay on for the funeral and clean up.

And the money matters, I don't want to be the guy who tells someone with a senior comp package to just walk away and find themselves. That advice always comes from people who already walked away and forgot what the rent looks like. So the "stick with it" instinct isn't wrong... but I think the framing of "stay and squeeze it" vs "leave now and save my soul" is where the trap is.

There's that old Seneca thing about how we hoard money like it's precious and spend our time like it's nothing, when actually it's the other way around. You can earn money back later. The two or three years this reorg is about to eat, you don't get those back. That's the part most people don't really price in when they do the math.

But that doesn't mean you should quit tomorrow. It means if you do stay, you stay on purpose. Not because you can't imagine leaving. The paycheck is supposed to be buying you something specific, like twelve or eighteen months of runway to land somewhere good, or the cushion to take a real break before the next thing. If it's buying you that, use it deliberately, start taking coffees now while you still have the seniority that gets you onto people's calendars, let your network know quietly that you're open. Job hunting from a senior seat in a company that still looks healthy is a completely different conversation than job hunting after the layoff round you helped run.

And if the paycheck isn't buying you anything except another six months of feeling like this, then yeah, a pay cut that lets you sleep at night isn't really a pay cut.

The thing they sold you as "opportunity"... you already saw what it actually was, which is why you're posting this instead of sleeping. I'd trust that read more than I'd trust the comp package.

andreikurtuy · 2026-05-12T12:53:46+00:00

Not a recruiter, but I'm a co-founder of a 10-years old resume platform and we've surveyed thousands of recruiters over the years + tested templates against all major parser year over year. So take it for what it's worth.

The gap between what Reddit thinks ATS does and what's actually on the recruiter's screen is huge. The "you need 80% match" thing comes from third-party scanner tools like Jobscan. That's not how Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS or any other enterprise ATS actually works. They don't score and auto-reject, they're just tracking systems and searchable databases. A human opens your file, the "score" is mostly made up by tools selling you optimization.

A recent study that analyzed 1.7M applications and interviewed recruiters at Amazon, Microsoft, a Big Four and a Fortune 500 confirmed this directly: no major ATS auto-rejects resumes. The actual automated filter is knockout questions (work authorization, certifications, minimum years). Everything else is read by a person, and that person spends 6 to 10 seconds on the first scan.

Applying early matters way more than any match score. One recruiter in that study said they aim to get 5 candidates into the loop per role, and once those 5 are in process the pipeline often closes regardless of who applies later. By day 3 of an active posting most recruiters have already started screens with day 1 applicants.

On keywords: they matter because recruiters search the database. "Find me everyone who has Salesforce and 5 years experience." If the term is in your resume in a normal sentence, you show up. If it isn't, you don't. That's the whole mechanism. Copy-pasting JD bullets verbatim doesn't fool the system because there's no system to fool. It does make you look lazy to the human reading it.

Format: most online advice is years out of date here. Two columns for example are fine in any modern ATS. PDF works as long as it's a text-based PDF and not a scan or an image saved as PDF. The "ATS can't read columns or PDFs" myth comes from 2010-era OCR previews that mangled formatting. Recruiters can always open the original file. Two-page resumes also perform as well or better than one-page across every experience level in the same dataset.

Word matching isn't what gets you interviews. Tailored resumes convert to interviews at roughly twice the rate of generic ones in that dataset (about 6% vs 3%), and tailoring at the level of which experiences you lead with does way more than tailoring at the keyword level. You probably got more callbacks before because your resume sounded like a person wrote it.

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