Brainfuse Is Braindead

I contacted Brainfuse for assistance with my resume. It’s promoted by public libraries including all three public library systems in New York City (New York (three boroughs), Brooklyn, and Queens).

I submitted my resume through the Resume Lab. “To receive the best personalized feedback, please include some details about the job or purpose for your file. If you have any additional comments or areas you would like us to focus on, please let us know here.”

My introductory message read as follows:

I need help getting my resume past artificial intelligence. I had my resume analyzed by TopResume, and their interpretation was functionally illiterate. It interpreted my top skills as the following: clients, real estate, career development, medical sales, public health, search engine optimization, seo, solutions, web design, public relations, architecture, human resources, adobe premiere, advertising, customer service, customer service representative, mimi, proofreading, receptionist.” Some of these are mentioned not even once on my resume. Others are mentioned only in proper names. Indeed has stupidly inquired why I don’t have a real estate license, an architecture license, and don’t have pediatrics on my resume, the latter simply because I wrote an article about a pediatrician. I have a BA in English and communication and an MA in film and media. These are the fields in which I would prefer to work. The most frequently mentioned words on my resume are writing and editing. “Mimi” and “architecture” appear once each and are somehow deemed more important by the AI, so anyone who tells me that quantity of mentions is the issue doesn’t know what they are talking about. I mention editing 17 times and writing 16 times, but those weren’t deemed top skills. I am medically limited to desk work and was hospitalized for my back two weeks after commencement for my master’s degree. I became homeless in 2012 for lack of interviews because the Social Security Administration said that because I can do desk work, I am not eligible for Disabilty. I left the shelter system in 2020 on a CityFHEPS voucher, but my work was sporadic. Editing for independent projects rather than a publisher, listed as freelance work, as well as low-level, low-wage office work that I don’t put on my resume because I don’t want it, and it won’t get mr off my dependency on CityFHEPS, either. This resume is kind of a template, but when some job search sites stupidly allow you to use only one resume, this is what I use, and it doesn’t work. Over the eight years of my homelessness, I applied to 4,083 jobs, interviewed for 33 that were mostly scams or temp service intakes with no jobs available, and got eight short-term jobs. I haven’t filed an income tax return since 2018. For low-level office work, I mostly used a resume developed for my by Melissa Gallego at the SIBL, which was no more effective at getting me interviewed for those jobs than this one was for jobs I might actually want. So many of those eight jobs are too high-level for such a resume, and not including them leaves a gap. I’ve been told not to lie, leave a gap, or put things irrelevant to a position on a resume. I do not think that it is possible to do all three. Certainly there is no way for me to do both the latter two, as they are mutually exclusive.

They promise a 48 hour turnaround time. My first attempt was sent at 1:41 AM on Sunday, April 7, and I received this message from Sarah Wheeler at 7:01 AM the same day:

Dear Student,
For specific questions about your paper, please resubmit through the Brainfuse Writing Lab. Thank you for choosing the writing lab, and best wishes with your revisions!

I waited 48 hours, hoping that that was a mistake, and that my resume would eventually be addressed. I resubmitted my resume again through the Resume Lab, looking for a “Writing Lab” and not finding one. This time it was April 10 at 5:40 PM. At 7:41 PM, I received the same verbatim message from Sarah Wheeler. I contacted customer service.

Sent: 4/14/2024 9:58 AM
To: “info@brainfuse.com” <info@brainfuse.com>
Subject: Resume Lab

What is the point of having a Resume Lab submission form if you are going to tell people to submit through a different form that I couldn’t even find on the page? Where is this “Writing Lab” where I am supposed to submit my resume?

Attached are screenshots of the nonsensical form message I keep receiving and the dashboard that doesn’t include what I’m being told to do.

On Sunday, April 14, 2024 at 11:18:26 AM EDT, Brainfuse Info <info@brainfuse.com> wrote:
Hi Scott,

Thank you for contacting Brainfuse.

In this circumstance, the Writing Lab and Resume Lab are interchangeable. If you would like further feedback on a resume, you can submit it through the Resume Lab or connect to a live JobNow session later today.

Thanks,

Brainfuse

At 12:31 PM, I wrote back:

Apparently you didn’t bother to look at the attachments because your response is not addressing the fact that I got a form response telling me to resubmit my resume with the writing lab. I didn’t take a screenshot of the second one because it was verbatim the same as the first. Please tell me how to submit my resume without getting a form response. It’s been seven days since I first submitted my resume lab and have received nothing except that form message.

On April 15, at 7:59 AM, I received the following message:

Good morning Scott,

Thanks for clarifying, you are correct. We are having your submissions rechecked by our JobNow coaches and you will have them returned to your account.

Regards,

Brainfuse

At 9:49 AM, I got a response from Holly Griffin:

Just as a note, this is formatted more as a CV than a resume, and CVs are only used when you are applying for an academic, scientific, or research position. This is way too much information when you are applying for something that is not top-level executive or any of those things I listed a CV is used for. If you are doing a resume, you only want to have six bullet points per position. They should start with action words. The dates need to have the full month written out, and you need to put the business name and city/state under the job title. If you want to focus more on accomplishments than daily duties, you may want to do a functional resume where you list the top 10 accomplishments from the info below. You don’t list job titles, business names, dates, or daily job duties. I honestly think that is what you should do because this is way too long otherwise. There is a link at the bottom of the response page that shows proper formatting. Also, you do not want to cut anything that you have done over the past ten years.

My resume opens with the following skills summary:

Versatile writer, editor, proofreader, and video editor. Expert on New York City’s homeless and housing crisis and frequent panelist at housing forums with state and municipal policy makers, law students and national press. Collaborated on educational board game and comic book. Adobe certified web designer.

She suggested changing “homeless” to “homelessness” and add “an” before “educational,” things I had previously deleted on “wasted real estate at the top of your resume” grounds. She also included Brainfuse’s one-pager on CVs. For failing to respond to anything in my message, she gets a grade of D-.

On Tuesday the 16th at 8:35 AM, I received a response from Tahirah Greene, who gets an absolute zero and needs to be fired for laziness and incompetence. She included Brainfuse’s one-pager on resumes rather than CVs, but offered three tiny bits of advice that were all completely wrong. The first was to pluralize “games” in my skills summary, a falsehood made clear in the details because I mention having worked on only one such game, Trustville. The second was where I wrote “Promoted to adjunct professor in 10/09, teaching one first year composition course. She wrote, “the correct preposition would be ‘on’.” If I had intended that to mean “October 9” rather than “October 2009,” I would have written “10/9,” not “10/09,” so the correct preposition would most certainly not be “on.” The only other “correction” she made was to tell me that I should not have used a semicolon for clarity in a serial list, but a comma instead. As Grammarly puts it, “You can use semicolons to divide the items of a list if the items are long or contain internal punctuation. In these cases, the semicolon helps readers keep track of the divisions between the items.”

On Wedenesday, April 17, I wrote the following message to Brainfuse customer service:

So I got two responses. None of them addressed any of my questions in the message. Holly Griffin gets a D, and Tahirah Greene gets not only an F but a zero. Hers had only three notes–one a pluralization that would be dishonest, one a misunterstanding of a month and year as a month and day, and one telling me to change a semicolon that was included for clarity. That was no more helpful than the one telling me to resubmit it a different way.

As of this writing, I have not received any response from Brainfuse. I forwarded my messages to the New York Public Library to inform them what an atrocious service Brainfuse is, as my Brainfuse login is with my NYPL library card, but I have also not received a response from them. I wrote on one of their Brainfuse flyers at the Stavros Niarchos branch that it was a scam, but it was taken down within the day.  I had left my cane in the bathroom after a protest in fron of the governor’s office a few blocks away and needed to come back later to retrieve it.  While “scam” may not be the right word because library patrons are not directly charged for using this services, it’s probably a similar situation as Eddie Harris Men’s Shelter. I accused them of embezzling taxpayer dollars on this blog on October 9, 2012. The New York Post reported on December 16, 2019 that Frank Boswell, CEO of Bushwick Economic Development Corporation, which runs Eddie Harris Men’s Shelter, had embezzled taxpayer funds that were supposed to be used for the benefit of the homeless but instead used to line his wallet with a $651,000 personal salary.