Just a suggestion: I think it would be a good idea to showcase the variety of your available designs up-front, without requiring a signup. I imagine that a big reservation people will have is that they won't want their resume to be recognizable as "one of the three templates offered by that resume generator." You don't have to show a full PDF sample, but just a gallery showing that there is a large crowd of designs one can blend into would go a long way.
This is a good example of where UX means a different thing to the user than to the developer. Just because it's available on another page doesn't mean the customer is going to take the time to go figure that out. Take these criticisms graciously and learn how your user's use your software it's going to improve your products immensely.
Just an FYI if you didn't know this- stackoverflow.com has something _similar_. They have the concept of a developer story with the option to link to two different web versions as well as generating a PDF for you (no frills). e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/cv/leetrout
Looks like you've definitely put more effort in to the styles and the thumbnails look nice! I would love to see a small gallery of designs!
I'm -1 on photos on resume since it opens the door to a lot of bias (unconscious or not) so I hope you offer a lot options without photos / icons.
> I'm -1 on photos on resume since it opens the door to a lot of bias (unconscious or not) so I hope you offer a lot options without photos / icons.
To that end, many HR departments in the US have a blanket policy to reject applications with photos present due to the potential liability of bias or discrimination complaints. Many protected classes[1] can easily be identified via a photo. If they reject every application with a photo, it reduces their attack surface for future lawsuits or complaints.
Potentially less of an issue if you go through recruiters or hiring managers directly, as the recruiters will just redact that part of the resume if needed and hiring managers may not know (or follow) standard HR policies. But you still open yourself up to a risk of rejection purely by inclusion of a picture, irrespective of the content of your resume or capabilities.
Did you try the tool? inside you can see a sample of all designs, or do you mean you would like to see them in the landing? something to keep in mind to update it.
Yeah, I'm with you on the bias with the pictures. I want to work on a way to customize a little bit (like removing picture, icons or changing the color accent) of designs before generating, but I have to think it out before building. That's why in the meantime I included a couple of designs without picture for people to use :D
This is not usually the case. Initial resume reviews are often done by HR, some algorithm, or at least somebody who is not who you will actually be working with on the day-to-day. It is incredibly difficult to root out all of the biases in the job application process and even automated attempts have failed[1]. It is best to avoid any opportunity for bias to even enter the system. To say that you're okay being rejected from a job due to your appearance because you wouldn't want that job anyway is defeatist and hurts the cause of those who are truly disadvantaged and would very much like to be employed.
This attitude assumes that bias is present only as random individual instances, not consistently across groups. What percentage of jobs are you willing to say that e.g black people should be willing to pass by?
For me, integration with Linkedin would be much more powerful than integration with Github. My Github is full of my experiments and side projects with ReasonML, OCaml and Clojure. My day job is all about building React applications. Also, a better preview of the non-free themes would be nice but I could imagine you are concerned with people extracting the CV without paying.
Thanks for sharing. Could you help me see clearly the value offered by your product?
In my case, I have a word document that I only occasionally export to pdf when I'm searching for new opportunities, let's say once every two years. Updating is not too much of a hassle for me because I end up just having to add a few lines summing up my new experience since last time.
Am I missing something, or is everyone doing it differently?
Yeah, while researchign for this I found it's what a lot of people tend to do, so don't worry :P
Other users (like me) tend to look for a more polished design than that of what MS word/Google Docs etc... offer, but it is perfectly normal, this use case might not be relevant for you.
* privacy: if it's not client-side only, how do I know you're not saving all my data and selling it to advertisers recruiters spammers etc?
* popularity: a random recruiter pulls up two applications and they both have the exactly same template. this is probably a bad thing. best case scenario you become less unique and more forgettable, worst case scenario they think you're a liar that has plagiarized the resume from somewhere and the contents aren't correct
Completely see your point in the privacy aspect, but it is really difficult to offer a good user experience with a project like this without storing data. I don't even consider selling data as part of a business model for my projects but I understand that is opaque to the user and not everyone is like this.
On the second argument, I assume recruiters are seeing tons of resumes presented in the same package daily. I don't think this will affect negatively to the applicants. Hopefully this starts becoming a problem and I get to work and design 100 more templates for variety :)
Moreover, as a person who participated in hiring a lot, a unique design for every CV isn't something I'd be happy with. The more it unified, the easier to scan the paper for the things I'm looking for.
(because you being a recruiter/recruited a lot) Out-of-context, shamelessly plugging https://nextRound.ml to consider your feedback. To keep the thread precise to the OP, drop an email at uday@notyce.me (just in case you want to feedback) .
One the second point, you could add the option to change the color scheme/font of each template to arbitrary colors set by the user. In this way the chances that two CV look the same are slightly smaller if the user customizes the template. The next step being a template builder, but I understand that that is probably a much bigger endeavor
You could always do it the Europass way and embed the metadata in the PDF. Their system can read back its own exports into the interface and allow you to edit the contents. Would still work with your subscription model too.
I use LaTeX for my resume and it has been the best experience so far. My content is super simple, and technically I could change the format whenever (although I'd have to learn LaTeX to modify the template, but I'm sure it's not too difficult).
Nowadays I use Overleaf's online tex editor, so I don't even need tex installed to update it.
Would you be interested in sharing your template? I used to use TeX, but the available templates never interested me, and I didn't have the time to DiY a good one.
Photos should not be included on resumes sent to most American companies. They are a huge source of bias in the the hiring process and will either be rejected or have the photo removed immediately.
But there are markets where they are expected. In Germany, your resume has a good chance of being discarded if it doesn't display a photo. That has to be kept in mind when making tools like this. They seem to have templates both with and without photos.
Asking for father's name is pretty much India's equivalent of Americans asking "what's your current salary", you use it to judge the person's situation.
I don't see how. Last name is same usually for both father/son, and you can't figure anything out from first name. It's almost useless information I think, except maybe differentiate between two people with same name, which is useful only for government applications I think.
In some parts of India, first names can be very lengthy, and contain lots of information, like: where you're from, your father's name, your grandfather's name, etc.
Wow, I'm an Indian, and I didn't know that. But yeah, I still dunno what can be potential use of that information in a resume. Sometimes, I think it's just because of old traditions where people introduce someone as "X son of Y from Z".
Being from America the nation, obviously. I'm sure you're just being pedantic, but that is how it's used. I'm not sure why you feel a need to make a point about this.
Not trying to be pedantic, I’m still somewhat confused when I read “america” when referring to the United States of America. Reason being, everywhere outside of the US, we learn that America is the continent. People who are much less into reading forums in English, or with a high percentage of US readers, can get even more confused, specially when the context is as vague as in this specific response.
Except no one refers to "America, the continent". It's always North America, South America, The Americas, or possibly Central America (though that's not really a continent). Typically America is the nation. This is doubly true because there is really no other good term for a citizen; "United States Citizen" is verbose and somewhat clinical, and there is no such word as "United Statesian". That's part of what happens when you choose a name for a nation with more than one word.
Wow, I didn't realise this was the norm in Germany. In the UK, a photo would never be expected, and would seem odd if received; I assumed the rest of the EU was the same, but especially the Western-most parts.
I can't think of an obvious reason why anyone -- other than someone being hired specifically for their looks such as a model or an actor -- should include their photo along with their curriculum vitae. What "obvious" reasons are you thinking of? To prove they're not a bot or a house pet?
To quote Drawn Together's Foxxy Love: "This whole test is racially biased! Question one: 'What SPF lotion would you use if your were going down to the polo grounds, fellow Klan member?'"
I'm sorry... I mean, really? I thought you were just trolling originally, playing up the "I don't see race" trope. Well, I'll spell it out very plainly for you then: A profile picture facilitates hiring discrimination on the basis of age, sex, race, beauty, and possibly other factors as well.
You'd get into trouble if you wrote "I am a young, white, normal-looking man" on the top of your resume... but maybe if you just sliiide a little headshot in you'll get the message across.
> A profile picture facilitates hiring discrimination on the basis of age, sex, race, beauty, and possibly other factors as well.
I agree with you. That's why I said I don't see why anyone other than an actor should put their photo on a resume, because it makes it easier for the reviewer to discriminate based on illegitimate reasons.
Perhaps there's a misunderstanding? This discussion thread has been about why anyone should include a photo, not why they shouldn't. Unless they want to attempt to benefit from such discrimination by having a favored appearance, which we want to discourage.
The reason people should do it today is because in some places, not including a photo would be like leaving out your name. The likely reason that custom began, which is I think what was being explained, is racism.
given that germany is the country where this custom is common, and adding that especially in germany any non-german can easily be recognized by their name alone, giving racism as the reason for that custom to develop is almost absurd.
it doesn't, but in germany that's a small minority of cases. and even germans who would want to preferably hire other germans would not worry about that case as long as one parent is german.
you have to keep in mind that germany has a strong fear of history repeating itself and has strong laws to prevent that. so any hint of xenophobia in the hiring process could be a PR or legal nightmare for a company.
if photos on the resume would be a problem in that regard, they'd have been outlawed already.
Germany does outlaw requesting photos on a job application, so they clearly see some kind of problem with it. But attitudes today are not the ones to look at when trying to figure out why it became a common practice in the past.
yup, i noticed that. things are changing. however, i was arguing about the reason why the practice started. and i still strongly doubt that racism is the one. not that there aren't racist germans, but because with a few exceptions in germany a picture doesn't tell anything more about race that a name wouldn't already tell.
if i were to speculate for the real reason then it is whether the applicant looks presentable. german office culture is rather uptight. it is also likely that it started on the candidate side, and that people realized that including a picture would make them stand out more.
Culture, customs. Things are just like they are in various countries. Asking why makes little sense. Most customs can be useful in some situations and less useful, even disturbing in others.
That said if you apply for a qualified job in a foreign country you should have some familiarity with the customs of the target country, at least from reading. Otherwise working there might cause quite some difficulties for both sides.
I know what I am talking about. I knew foreign country B from being a trainee there. Later I went to its neighbor country C to work permanently. Given the fact that they are neighbor countries I assumed to know both of them. Well, there were quite some surprises...
Everybody here is drowning in their conspiracy theories...it's just culture.
Why do we shake hands, other than to give the other person our germs so that if I have a deadly disease the other guy will die too? Well maybe because it's just established. To show that you have respect for the other party, even that you are willing to follow customs. Calm down everyone!
"Culture" is just a set of practices and assumptions that have been internalized - talking about where they came from is anthropology/history. You can certainly have conspiracy theories in there, but you seem to have confused those with any explanation at all.
If you're REALLY naive, so you can put a face to the person. Could also be seen as a form of “authentication” i.e. to stop people from submitting multiple resumes. I personally consider that misuse far outweighs any reasonable use except for actors models and such
Are there any sources you can cite on this? I've never heard of HR chucking resumes because they have a headshot of the person. If companies are that paranoid about bias, I'd think they'd go as far as to never use LinkedIn.
They may not dispose of the resume, but they may ask for a resubmission without the photo, or may black it out before passing it further into the process.
I made this tool because I always feel the pain when having to update my resume as well as my friends ones.
Since I tend to keep my Github pretty updated my idea was having a way to generate a professional looking resume getting the information from my profile (personal data, website, tags, repos, etc...) the fastest possible, without having to tinker much with the design or anything.
I haven't had the opportunity to test it with many people yet, so any feedback is more than appreciated.
I didn't know that existed, but it looks REALLY nice. It would be cool to allow for users to signup with regular email/password and let them import their own json.
I won't release the project per se, but I do plan on striping out all the business logic and release a full stack SaaS scaffolding (Node + React) of the project with the basics (dockerized dev enviroment, a CRUD, authorization, deploy ready etc...) for anyone to build a product like this. this.
JSON Resume needs more contributors, pretty badly. It's a great project, but it's languished a bit over the years and some tooling have broken. I encourage anyone who uses it to throw a little time into the codebase. It's not that hard/complex of a project.
Quick comment - I haven't gone thru the entire site, etc - so maybe you are already aware.
I saw the free vs paid options - and the paid being "$30" and I was asking myself "$30 for...how long?" - so I went back (because I didn't want to make a fool of myself before I commented) and read it carefully...and..."oh - for one year of access"
Ok - that's fair - but I want to suggest that you make that part a bit more prominent on that card, because if I missed it I am sure others will as well. I don't think the price is unfair (seems reasonable out the gate) - but knowing the terms of how long you get access for that price shouldn't be something you have to search a bit for.
Actually at first it was very evident $30/year, but I removed it in the last minute because it seemed like a suscription (which is not). Definetly going to make that thing stand out more.
For a while I've been building my resume(s) by using a LaTeX template (specifically [0]) and copy-pasting data from my LinkedIn profile which I keep fairly up-to-date. It's worked pretty well for me especially when I had to put together academic resumes for which I could just add my publication through the standard LaTeX bibliography practices.
I've toyed with the idea of making a resume generator SaaS where the user would enter their LinkedIn URL which my app would scrape and use it to populate different LaTeX templates rendered server-side into PDFs (for free) while offering some sort of editor or the raw LaTeX (in a premium version) where the user could apply edits.
While AFAIK scraping LinkedIn was deemed lawful in some previous court case [1] I fear it would be a hard sell. Wonder what kinda trouble I would run into.
Maybe a bit off topic, but a targeted cover letter for the specific job you are applying for is also important. I have a template in Latex that I have used on all jobs after university :)
Years ago I was using a Word document for my CV but every time I wanted to update the style it was a pain. I found a command line tool that I have been using for years which allows to decouple data (json) and presentation (web technologies based themes, I created my own theme). The name is hackmyresume (https://github.com/hacksalot/HackMyResume) or fluentcv (https://github.com/fluentdesk/FluentCV). I'm afraid it's no longer maintained but I still use it. It supports JsonResume (JRS) and also its own format FRESH. It outputs to multiple formats including word and pdf.
You say "For one year" but you don't say what that means. I don't know if it's avilable for download for a year, that it keeps syncing for a year, or if you retain license to the design and I can use it without paying you for one year even if I say make a PDF of it and edit that going forward. So some terms and conditions, as annoying as they are, would be helpful, since I don't actually know what I'm buying here. I think you do know.
I haven't tried this yet, but I like your pricing model more than the others I've looked at.
I tried cake resume a while ago and while it was nice-ish, they wanted to sign up for a $7.95-$15.95/mo recurring charge (I feel like it was even closer to $20 a last time I looked?)
Yeah, I gave it a lot of thought, because being realistic who needs to build resumes every month?
I think having a 1 year access without recurring subscription is a nice way to be able to use the product (including updates) and not having to charge for something weird like single use/downloads.
So, I'm looking into your sample resume at https://bytevitae.com/cv/bytevitae_sample.pdf. Unsure, if I understood "OPEN SOURCE" section means. Also, when I tried to copy your previous company name "Influencity" it is copied as "Inbuencity".
Care to see what I did with this resume using https://notyce.me? I validated it to check the resume's suitability in job market. Have a look https://ibb.co/sqqQ1yb
Wow, that "Inbuencity" bug is a weird one O_o, just tried it myself and same happens. Don't even know how it is possible, something about the font maybe?
Open source represents open source contributions (aka repos).
The two characters “f” and “l” are, when typeset, frequently combined into the “fl” ligature. Probably, this is what happens here, and some combination of bugs causes the fl ligature not to be correctly translated back into “fl” when copied.
I designed the templates taking inspiration on what friends showed me, what found online as well as my previous resumes.
To be completely honest its the first time I see that website! But I can see how the black sidebar one looks similar, but they all use pretty common heavily used design patterns.
Definitely! There's only so much room to maneuver on resume layouts as it is.
One of the, if no THE, most important things I found was the machine readability of a resume. We could build generators that spit beautiful resumes all day but they wouldn't ever get in front of a human to care.
I love playing around in Adobe Illustrator and so built my resumes in there. I spent DAYS and WEEKS crafting what I thought were a beautiful, icon rich, intuitive, apple-of-my-eye resumes. 250+ applications later the only time I ever got any response was from one or two small operations where it was a human manually reviewing submissions.
Turns out HR/recruiting suites that companies use aren't so hot on parsing, classifying, and tagging image based PDF resumes. Haha, who knew, right?
Finally a friend turned me on to LaTex and I had GREAT success with that. This made a ton of sense: what could be more machine readable than something built out using markup elements, tags, and IDs that explicitly do all that classifying work for the programs already.
So yeah, huge take-away: when your site constructs the resume if you're using HTML and then converting out to PDF (what we did on PortHub) make sure your HTML is verbose and explicit, even if it doesn't get displayed "on page".
That is a problem I had on an unrelated project with image based PDFs. With this one I wanted to avoid that, if you check the output, it is text 100% selectable (and even some interactive elements). So hopefully it avoids that problem.
Surely not as easy to parse as something done explicitly for that, but hopefully good enough.
Such good insights in your post! thanks for sharing your past experience.
I wasn't expecting much, but I downloaded the sample, and it's definitely something I'd be interested in. Made me think, "Oh yeah, you should do it that way"
I made mine as an SPA with Vuejs and some CSS libraries, then converted it to PDF with the print option. It felt appropriate. Material.io style resume, bam!
I used it for the first time last week, and I am on to the second round of interviews.
The only major problem I had was the pdf conversion cutting off the styled container. I fixed it by adding an excessive top margin. So just be aware and check the formatting before you ship. :D
Random bug report, long names overflow into the skills section. Fun tool, though I personally prefer making my own website with print css that is the resume itself (with a PDF copy).
Do you use {La,}TeX for the resumes? If yes, do you make it possible to download the files in TeX format for your paying users, so they may be hand-tweaked by them?
1) Does it use templates? If so, resumes will probably look similar to each other, and not stand out from their competition. Is this assumption incorrect?
2) In my opinion, a developer using a resume generator sounds kind of unprofessional or even lazy ("highest quality developer resume in less than 5 minutes"), in contrast to say, using LaTeX (without templates).
Does anyone remember the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator? It's not up anymore, but here is a rough clone:
https://lotta.se/mission-statement-generator
Click the button to automatically generate a new mission statement.
Good site and design. My honest reservation about using drastically different resume formats is - resume parsers. Most recruiting agencies, large companies using some form resume parsing to aid in filtering out candidates. Not sure if your formats will get parsed correctly.
I love the idea and simplicity, but if you want conversion to paid plans you must make the paid templates previewable before purchase to establish trust in the investment before the user purchases.
The website after clicking "get started for free" does not work. It is only a black white page. After looking at the source, I can see the problem. It is _JS only_. The JS is uglified as well, so I am not trusting it. You could have at least made some effort to include a noscript tag.
The website also looks like it is hiding functionality behind a registration, instead of letting me try right away, but I cannot confirm this, as the website does not work, as stated above.
sorry, not currently. I should have added that option. By now please send an email to contact@bytevitae.com and I will delete it for you. Sorry for that.
I like it, and it's got me some good roles (probably also kept me from some roles as I'm sure some threw it in the trash thinking it smelled of marketing rubbish; but I still like it so whateves), but it's also a pain to update.
I looked at adapting HackMyResume (listed in the comments) and got somethings into the standard JSON format, but I wanted to keep my timeline and getting it to work programmatically was way more difficult than I thought. Someone provided this answer on StackExchange for Laytex, but I never got things to lineup correctly and sorta gave up:
Every time I think about doing it programmatically, I start down a path, get frustrated and realize I need something now, and end up just updating the old one in Illustrator. I hesitate to use a tool like this since mine looks unique and don't want anyone to recognize it comes from a standard template. It's still pretty neat though and I like the idea of allowing a preview with a watermark as a means to attempt to monetize it.
As someone who has read a lot of resumes, I really like this! It gets to the core points quickly.
My only suggestion would be to put the names of the companies in italic or differentiate it in some way.
When I read a resume, the very first thing I do is scan the name of the companies you've worked at to see if I recognize any of them as either a place known for great hires or somewhere I've actually worked. I had to go down to your "normal resume" to do that easily.
Edit to clarify: I don't ever cut anyone because of where they worked or went to school. I'm only looking for a signal in the noise or some common experience for us to discuss.
> When I read a resume, the very first thing I do is scan the name of the companies you've worked at to see if I recognize any of them as either a place known for great hires or somewhere I've actually worked.
Ughh, as someone who went to a state school and spent most of his career toiling away at non-name brand companies, please allow me a moment to shake my fist angrily at you over the Internet!
You’ve probably already considered this and accept the trade off, but I can’t help but think that these kinds of filters result in many false negatives and contribute to some of the monocultures we find inside tech companies (everyone here is ex-Microsoft, everyone here is from Stanford or MIT, etc.) When building the content for a resume, Shouldn’t the work content be more important than name dropping celebrity companies? Am I being too naive?
Honestly I wish there was a norm of not mentioning specific companies on resumes, letting your actual skills and experiences speak for themselves, but that ship sailed long before I was born.
I don't ever cut anyone because of where they worked or went to school. I'm only looking for a signal in the noise or some common experience for us to discuss.
>I’m only looking for a signal in the noise or some common experience for us to discuss.
That is a strange thing to do on first read for someone who reads a lot of resumes.
You can be honest. Nobody here will be surprised. When you are held responsible for who you hire, it’s logical to defer to heuristics like that. I have never met anyone truly passionate about hiring black swans. I don’t think it is your fault, but this trend is just as common as it is harmful to society as a whole.
>When I read a resume, the very first thing I do is scan the name of the companies you've worked at to see if I recognize any of them...
I don't know if it really gets to the core points quickly. I think the information hierarchy is a little bit lacking if I can't even tell where the person has worked within a few seconds of looking at their resume - the document designed to convey that specific information. It's also very long in my opinion.
Thanks for sharing, that is indeed a quite complex resume, quite a challenge to keep it programatically.
Actually your same experience is what took me to make this, the pain of having to open Illustrator to edit the resume once again. Atleast for the next time I got this. And thanks for the kind words :)
Part of my job involves data visualization, and what better way to flash those skills on a resume then making custom graphics with my work experience as a dataset.
How much do job applicants get paid to apply for jobs? How much effort do you expect them to put in, unpaid, to kiss your butt, specifically, when there are hundreds of companies that are just like yours? Many of those companies will simply ghost the applicants that put in extra effort to tailor the heck out of their resumes. There is no expected payoff for tailoring until after the company actually makes contact, using a real person, and by then you're already interviewing.
It would seem then that the best solution for the applicant is to create a program that reads in an advertised job posting and automatically tailors the base resume to it, so it looks like they put in effort for each company, but actually just did the work once and used the automated solution for everybody. That sounds like more fun than hand-tailoring resumes, anyway.
Given that none of us get paid to look good for potential employers, what sort of reciprocal effort does your company put in to tailor its recruiting to specific applicants? Are you saying that companies who don't actively recruit specific individuals from leads will likewise be overly passive when it comes to retention? Because that... seems accurate.
All you really know from an untailored resume is that the applicant didn't see tailoring to your company as worth the effort.
I would definitely agree for "How much do job applicants get paid to apply for jobs?", not just with this, also with LinkedIn Job Seeker, and other automated tools "to build kickass resume". Expect tips not subscription.
You should ensure your HN username doesnt show up with a background check on a google search because when I do that and I see comments like this you dont get a job.
Really? Are you interviewing for positions in your church, or early learning center?
Because if you screen people out because they use colloquialisms like "kissing butt" in amongst an otherwise professional web post, to be honest that doesn't sound like a fun place to work.
Would you care to mention the name of the company? I, and probably an insignificant handful of other unsuitable candidates, would likely benefit from never applying to work there. And I wouldn't want to waste your time, of course. Cyberstalking and doxxing sounds like a lot of work, especially if it's a rejection-only signal.
Interviewing and hiring is very important work, and your company is depending on you for its future. Six people in one week is huge. The people you hire are lucky to work at a place that has so few problems finding talent.
I wonder, though... Do you think that the nature of your work role has created a bias towards the recruiters and interviewers over the interests of the candidates? Or that it might be an abuse of your hiring authority to threaten a pseudoanonymous person on the internet with a permanent, pre-emptive no-hire status, over comments that are not obviously offensive, whose content is only objectionable due to disagreeing with something you said? As someone who hires, do you feel this is appropriate?
If the rules are published people can craft their lies better. Suffice to say interviews tend to surface these issues but that is a waste of my time. Yes the hiring process sucks but typically I know within 5 minutes of talking to someone if they have relevant skills.
The effort in the process shows how much they are or are not willing to work.
Perhaps if we charged folks for the time they waste it would fix that?
Would you be willing to pay 500/hr to interview ( close estimate to actual costs the company incurs )
