Many Brands, One Conglomerate: Monster, Zety, LiveCareer, MyPerfectResume, CareerBuilder All Owned by Same Parent Company

Meet the Bold Family of Brands: Monster, FlexJobs, LiveCareer, Zety, MyPerfectResume, CareerBuilder

Taking a page out of the car rental industry playbook (only 3 companies own 95% of the US car rental market, lol America), many of the top resume builders on Google are owned by the same conglomerate (Bold.com), presenting job seekers with the illusion of choice. A capitalist classic.

Bold Owns and Operates Many of the Largest Resume Builders

Bold – the conglomerate that owns Monster.com and FlexJobs – also owns the popular resume builders LiveCareer, MyPerfectResume, Zety, and CareerBuilder.

(Side note: this probably explains why all these specific resume builders are... well, bad.)

How did we unearth this conspiracy, you may ask?

The Pepe Silvia of Resume Builders

Well, it took us weeks of internet sleuthing and piecing together small clues from across the web... tracking down breadcrumbs from whistleblowers... receiving nondescript manila folders in parking garages...

Only kidding. In reality, it's just proudly stated on Bold's "About Us" page:

And they should be proud! This is like a PE's dream scenario, to own 4-5 of the top 10 brands in a single industry. Legitimately top-tier financializing. (Side note: their company Sonara appears to be one of those AI "auto-apply" platforms that are destroying the job market and recruiting industry by flooding job postings with thousands of applicants within minutes. We highly recommend against using these counterproductive AI auto-apply tools, but that's another soap box rant that we don't have time for today...)

Capitalism!

Look, we're not pooh-poohing the endless consolidation of industry. We're red-blooded Americans – we love capitalism and oligopolies just as much as the next corporation! Synergy rocks. Companies have the right to buy competitors and bring their businesses under the same corporate umbrella, and acquisitions are the lifeblood of modern American entrepreneurship. Cartman said it best: start up, sell out, cash in, bro down.

Beyond that, the endless consolidation of every industry is notoriously awesome for consumers, and never results in worse service, products, or prices. We all love waiting endlessly at the Enterprise rental car counter right next to National and Alamo... which for some reason offer their cars at the same exact price as Enterprise... huh, weird coincidence.

Anyway...

Sorry... can you repeat that phrase? "Antitrust"? Wtf is that? Lina Khan's college nickname?

This Explains a Lot

Since entering the resume builder industry in September 2024, Sheets Resume has taken the category by storm, meteorically rising to #1 on Google for "AI resume builder" in just a year since launch. Despite a crowded category with dozens or even hundreds of options (including from gigantic companies like Canva and Indeed), Sheets Resume is now the #1 choice on Google for people looking for an AI resume builder. Pretty cool to see that good products can still be rewarded on Google search results!

We've said over and over that our success (and our rave reviews!) is due to our resume builder's far superior UX, our single recommended format, our free resume templates, our well-explained philosophies on what makes a good resume, and how much better we treat our users (i.e., we answer emails quickly – can you imagine?). Plus, we give away temporary memberships for free to anyone who needs one (just email us!), which we assume has to count for something.

Even so, we were honestly kind of confused as to why every one of our resume builder competitors had the same bad user experience, same bad templates, same bad advice, same pushy sales process, and same nonexistent customer service (or really, even a fleeting interest in their users as human beings). It was like a wide open field to do something cool and different in a really backwards (and tbh, somewhat predatory) space.

Welp, now we know. We're not competing against a half dozen different resume software companies who are competing against each other to build better products at better prices; we're competing against "brands" in a "portfolio." For totally selfish reasons, we thought you should know this as you evaluate which resume builder to trust.

PS - Bold, if you're reading this, please reach out to [email protected] and make us an offer. For the right EBITDA multiple, we'll totally sell out, delete this blog post, and join the fam. You could use an outlaw brand archetype!

PPS - Bold even owns MyPerfectCoverLetter, the major competitor to our truly free, unlimited AI Cover Letter Generator! Is there no terrible job search software they won't buy?! (Again, plz buy us too.)