Last time I was looking for a job way back in 2016, instead of just making a résumé, I made a free résumé builder. It got on the front page of HN and ProductHunt and got a decent amount of usage.
I considered trying to take it further but didn't really see a clear path to any kind of investment or monetization at the time, so I ended up just using it as my résumé. I interviewed at one company and got the job, so I guess it helped! It did get a good reaction in the few interviews I did at that company.
Backstory: August of last year, after a year and a half from my last startup closing down, I decided it was time to get back to work. The time had been spent with my family, and watching my son in his first year. It was a good time. But getting back to work would mean getting a job, and at the time, I was more concerned about a solid pay check. Obviously, in this economic climate, it was a bit scary, but I had ample experience and was confident I could land a job. I went to work. I had to create a resume, and then get it up online. I bought the domain name, and put it up there. Spent quite a bit of time getting it right. In the end, this is what allow my current employer to find me. A search on Google came up with my resume as the first result, provided the proper contact information, and made it easy for them to get in contact with me. After interviews and negotiations, I got the job.
My brother is in a situation like this as well. He's part of the inspiration for this project. The idea is that I had to spend time putting together the website, the design, even as simple as it was, and making sure it got up on the search engines. None of this was difficult for me to do, but for someone like my brother, he doesn't even realize it's something he should do. A resume on Monster.com isn't geared toward the masses and SEO. It's geared toward Monster.com searching.
Since leaving school, I've gotten all my jobs because someone knew me somehow and recommended me in some capacity. Of those, 3 of them also included what I did online. One, in fact, included me walking into the interview with a stack an inch thick of what the interviewer had found online about me.
The reality is, most people get jobs through word of mouth. Someone knows someone, or their is some common ground. At least the good jobs.
So, the idea for the site is bred from some simple ideas:
1. It's good to have a website dedicated to your resume. To promoting yourself. You want a search result with your name to return your resume, your own personal advertisement, rather than some random Facebook page.
2. You want to always be promoting yourself. The job market has changed, and you want to be out there. If someone is interested in searching for you, you don't want them to have to go searching for more information. You want that information to be easily found.
3. Most people don't have the time or energy to invest in creating an highly optimized online resume. Couple this with the cost of having to buy hosting, and the price can get a bit high just for a place to put an online resume.
4. People need jobs. In the current market, job hunting has become even more important. People are becoming aware that it's important to always be prepared to find a job. If you aren't actively pursuing a better job, you're hurting yourself.
5. For far too long, job hunting has been employer-centric. Advertise a job, receive resumes. People are coming to accept that advertising their own skills is becoming important. Social networks are, in a way, teaching people to put their lives online in an orderly fashion; a personal resume.
6. Employers focus too much on accepting resumes instead of getting what they want. It's difficult for employers to find people with the skills they need on their own, without going through an agency. Even then, it's still focused on hiring unemployed people or people that are actively looking.
These are pretty broad ideas, but rather simple. They describe the problems, the issues at hand. The service seeks to solve these problems in various ways, to service not only the potential employees, but the employers as well.
1. Simple to use. The site is focused on providing an efficient, professional resume. You fill in the blanks. The goal is to be fast, painless, and get up something good, quick.
2. The service is meant to be long term. Year-long terms here. The idea goal is for the resume to be a "living resume." It updates itself, or you update it, with the current status. It's smart. A year goes by, and 5 years of experience becomes 6, for example. You are encouraged to update.
3. Everything is optimized. The page itself is optimized for search engines. The design will be optimized for easy viewing. Easy printing. Easy sharing. SEO will not just be on the resume itself, but also for searching. Need a Rails Developers in Atlanta Georgia? We'll make that easy to find.
4. You're always promoting yourself. The goal is to make a search for your name appear at or near the top of the search result. This is, after all, your page with your professional information.
5. No ads. I mean, the entire site is basically an advertisement, each page for a particular person, if you want to get technical, but no flashing banner ads, text ads, etc.
6. Low cost. Pay a yearly fee, something reasonable.
There is a lot of potential for expanding the services offered. Being able to put up a portfolio would be important. Pictures of yourself if you wanted. Customization through CSS.
Standards would be important. Exporting contact information as well as the resume itself. All the data would be used and indexed on. Searching and pages could be made on anything.
Anyway's, that's a brief overview of the idea. There are tons of other specifics, and other ideas, as well as ways to go about marketing it and getting users. My questions are simple:
1. Would you pay for a service like this?
2. Do you know others that would pay for a service like this?
3. Have you ever built an online resume/portfolio?
4. Would this service benefit professionals in industries outside web developers?
5. Would businesses outside web-based/focused companies use such a means to find employers?
I'm sure there are other questions, I'll have, and frankly, you don't need to answer these questions point by point. Just wanted to give you an idea of some of the initial questions I might have. Any input at all is encouraged.
As a final point, I've searched online for a service like this, and while I've found a few that promote the same basic thing, I haven't found anything that really capture what I would want in a service. In tech-terms: a Web 2.0 Online Resume site.
I've put a lot of thought into this, played around with some initial designs, hacked up some code, but at this stage, I'm more eager to gain some initial feedback before investing heavily into this idea. So, have at it.
Last time this was brought up someone said, well yeah it's a resume builder. And get a job with it, then work on it at work. That's why they hired you, you're the xxxx guy.
I've seen a bunch of online resume sites like that popping up. Mine is aimed more at non-designer/developers - people applying for lower-level jobs, or even students applying for their first job. I wanted it to be something that could be used by the people who need it most. I've been working with a few non-profit job placement organizations to make them their own similar generators!
A lot has happened since my launch on HN with Resoume.
But today I wanted to present you the little brother I named Resou — the lite but free version.
2020 was not a great year for many of us. To help where I can, I decided to create a free resume builder out of Resoume.
This is also a pilot project for me. I heard once that a free product could be a great way to generate new traffic. So I thought this might be a great way to find out. Two birds with one stone.
What do you think? Is this a workable way to give something of value? Will users bother testing Resoume? I appreciate your feedback.
Funny I stumbled upon this discussion because I just used this pretty cool service called HipRez to revamp my plain resume into a resume website. Has definitely been great for getting my foot in the door with job interviews and responses to job applications.
It's a bit tangential to searching, but the tool I made, Resgen[0], helps tailor resumes to job descriptions. Made it for myself, but after helping others with their resumes, I built it out for others to use as well. The plan is to develop it to be an all-in-one recruiter that sources jobs for you to apply to.
For now, though, I'm mostly just using LinkedIn and Otta to source jobs.
Last time I was on the job market, I wrote a little CLI tool that given data in yaml format, spits out a pixel perfect pdf resume. It took me 2 hours and about 200 combined lines of Python, HTML and CSS.
While I wish the author the best of luck, I’m not sure resume builders for developers are a hot market.
I'm not job seeking at the moment but when I was, I would have paid for a site like this that would allow me to create tailored resumes for each application, manage the list, and ideally have some version control. Might be outside the scope of what you were working on but definitely a way to go from side project to side business. Contact me if you'd like more feedback.
Hi,
my name is Katherine and I built the really easy-to-use resume builder. You can create your resume, save data, and download the PDF file without registration.
But with registration it's better: you will able to create multiple profiles and therefore, generate multiple resumes.
Why did I create it?
First of all, it's a part of my experiment where I wanted to build really simple, one-function tools to solve some problems. I have a list (now it has more than 20 ideas) of such small tools. I picked up this one because it what bothered me for a long time.
Since I'm a software developer with 17+ years of experience I had to apply for a job many times and creating a resume specifically for every single position was a real pain. So, I thought that maybe other developers have the same problem. Also, I'm going to add some functionality for keeping the information about applications and other features like export to Word, automatic applying etc. (yeah, it's much beyond one function but it still tries to relieve a bit the process of searching and applying for jobs).
So, this is my story. I'd like to hear from folks here what you think about it.
Does it worth to keep working on it?
Do you think you have another, more significant problem to be solved in this scope?
Do you have any suggestions?
I hate the fact that so many of these resume generators only support downloading as PDF.
Maybe (?) that works for the super-elite echelon who don't really have to "job hunt", and who maintain a resume only as a formality. But for the other 95%+ of plebs who have to actively apply or work with recruiters... MS Word is the only game in town, like it or not.
I loved the idea behind JSON Resume (https://jsonresume.org) a year ago (i.e. separate the content from the styling, store the content in source control and track it or branch as needed, and apply the content to whichever template you like). But I didn't like the limited export capability... so I wrote Resume Fodder (https://resumefodder.com) as an open source alternative. I'd love to create more template options when I have time... pull requests welcomed!
The people behind these resume generators know that MS Word is what most people need, but choose not to support it because that would undercut their business model. The business model dream is for you to host your content on their server, so they can mine it and sell access and hopefully cut off a slice of LinkedIn's pie.
So be it, but I just don't think there is a viable business model there. LinkedIn is already LinkedIn... and I suspect that smaller rivals will run into the same wall as Diaspora, Ello, and all the other would-be Facebook replacements. I think that people who check out these resume generators REALLY are looking for... a resume generator! And if it doesn't let you save your resume in the format that most people demand, then it isn't particularly useful in the real world.
A couple of years ago I started using LinkedIn's resume builder [1]. It takes my existing LinkedIn profile information and generates a nice-looking PDF in one of several user-selectable formats. I tweaked my profile information so that it looks decent in resume style. That satisfies 99% of my need for resumes -- and besides, most of the time anyone who asks for it has already looked at my LinkedIn profile anyway, and probably only wants a PDF as something to put in their file.
I am actually working on web app that walks you through building a solid resume based on my own UX opinions. Then at the end you can print out the pdf.
This is my resume (rather outdated now) and my opinionated design. http://resume.kristoffersen.io
Thoughts on a resume builder web app? Want to see one exist?
Looks nice from the landing page, but maybe a bit image-heavy for a resume isn't it?
On the topic of resume building though, while I haven't had the need for making one in a long time I have this idea I just want to throw out there.
Just make like an HTML page with every possible detail about your history. Then, in e.g. Chrome, you can easily hide the different sections/words that isn't related to the specific job you're applying for. Then print as PDF. Seems like it would be easy to maintain and "generate" the resumes per application.
It's no longer live but here's the archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20160305001753/https://makerslat...
I considered trying to take it further but didn't really see a clear path to any kind of investment or monetization at the time, so I ended up just using it as my résumé. I interviewed at one company and got the job, so I guess it helped! It did get a good reaction in the few interviews I did at that company.
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