As a former hiring manager, I looked at your 100 first templates, and I must say that I don't like them. Yes, they look amazing and I would hire you to design my site's CSS, but for a job seeker, they are distracting. I want to see the job experience. I don't need special effects around "job experience", I don't need fancy backgrounds which make it harder to read the information.
Sorry to be negative. Again, the designs are very cute, but not "professional". My experience is limited to high-tech hiring.
I do my fair share of hiring and interviewing, and I agree with alain94040.
I have very hard time imagining that the rock star developer I'm trying to hire will spend $100 (or hours of their time) to add fancy styling to their resume. Why would they? It just seems like trying too hard. Of course I won't reject anyone because their resume looks "too pretty", but those templates make the resume stand out, and not necessarily in a good way.
I also want to third this, for tech hiring anyway.
I have far more time for a plain text resume that fits on one side of A4/Legal, than I do for anything else.
It's all about how quick I can scan the document and extract information from it that might tell me what experience a candidate might have.
For me, the quickest way I can scan something is to have it feel like something I work with every day: logically laid out text, in fixed width, with related chunks fitting on the same screen.
Give me a plain text resume any day. If you deeply feel the need, add syntax highlighting in the form of very subtle highlights and lowlights to make the most pertinent sections and key facts stand out. But if you do that, bear in mind that such highlights and lowlights should be the minority of your document.
It's not everybody's cup of tea. We understand that and that's fair. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback from both hiring managers and job seekers who actually have responded the opposite of what you're feeling. So, I guess it just depends.
Would you be impressed by more subtle qualities? Let's say a design with special effects, but printed with a professional printer on thicker paper. Maybe subtle effects like watermarks or micro embossing.
CVs are usually emailed and then printed on the office printer, so thicker paper may be redundant.
What is incredibly useful is understanding how those in a hiring organization read CVs, what they expect, and what they assume.
In terms of format: A lot of organisations, especially larger organisations for roles at more senior levels, output their internal candidate profiles, generated from internal systems, in landscape format. They will print a sent-in portrait document in portrait, but what is internally generated is often in landscape, with one left pane and one right pane. This spreads to computer-based viewing: Widescreen monitors are also becoming common place in offices, while laptop screens also tend towards a widescreen format. Why waste 2 large borders on each side of the page in default Word setup, Word being the default in large organisations.
I've never seen an externally sourced CV in landscape. Food for thought. Creative, or practical?
Also remember that eyesight tends to deteriorate with age. As an applicant, if the interviewer may be older, keep things legible.
Not really. After all I want my developers to write code that is, almost above all, simple (next only to working). So, showing a little appreciation for simplicity is a better way to impress me :)
Hey just a free idea if anyone want to build it, I think a web app that generated stylish resumes automatically from your LinkedIn profile would be great. It could make watermarked ones for free preview and then charge you a few bucks if you wanted to download a real one.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard "Well, my resume's a bit out of date, but here's my linkedin.."
Just because someone has an idea before you doesn't mean your idea is not worth pursuing. Execution is sometimes more important than being big or first.
OP here. I wrote this blog post to help the community - to share what I've learned and have done to get some traffic and have a fairly successful launch of a side project. Most of the discussion on this thread has been around resumes themselves and the business itself - which wasn't what my post was about. This really drives home one of the points that I made in my original post: Loft Resumes is polarizing. People seem to either love it or hate it. For some reason people seem to be passionate about resumes.
All that said, I'm really appreciative of the suggestions that people have shared both here and by email. I've learned a great deal from commenters on HN in general (a few have inspired another venture I'm looking at starting...) and appreciate the community, even though it can get a little harsh!
I'll comment with another note, I love that this is coming out of Greenville. I live here and have traveled to Boston, SF, Seattle, DC and others but Greenville is up and coming. It's not too big but not too small. It's still small enough to have a piece of the intimate south, but big enough to feel a great part of the vibrant city.
It's also dirt cheap to live here compared to somewhere else. A 2-3 bedroom apartment for downtown in the heart of everything will run less than 2k if you find a good spot. Also access to CoWork is awesome like the OP was saying. You can find out more about Greenville here, http://thenextbig.co/. All this to say, if you want to kind of step out of the norm a bit and experience something different but not leaving great talent Greenville is an awesome place to be.
> It's also dirt cheap to live here compared to somewhere else. A 2-3 bedroom apartment for downtown in the heart of everything will run less than 2k if you find a good spot.
As an NYC resident who lives in Chelsea, I wept when I read this.
The templates look great, congrats on the success. How did you arrive at the $99 price point?
Also: the submission title implies the project earned $10k in a month, but I didn't see that in the blog post itself. Where did that number come from? Is it accurate?
In my experience clean/light CV's are by far the best for almost every job - particularly engineering jobs. The exception being designers.
What sort of CV's are you seeing come in?
I know quite a few HR types who will find a snazzy looking CV and instantly demote it, on the basis that the sizzle is probably hiding some inadequacy (this is not necessarily a bad marker in my experience).
It would be interesting to see if the investment in this pays off for the candidate - whether the really high quality of the design flips it over that danger marker.
We've been surprised at the variety of professions coming in. There haven't been any real trends yet - we've had everything from CFOs to college students to marketers to folks in the legal field. We originally thought we'd see mostly careers that had an appreciation for design but where the job seeker wasn't necessarily a designer (like photographers or people in the music industry) as well as marketers. I guess that goes to show you don't always know your customer until you start selling
I'm not surprised you aren't seeing design types. A prebuilt template for that kind of position would be and instant red flag. Not to mention a merely "pretty" resume template would look bland amongst bespoke, polished portfolios and resumes.
Interestingy filtering results like that is the complete opposite of what the recent "I don't hire unlucky people." post suggested (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804134).
This is also the stuff that gives job seekers nightmares. The whole process is already a black box and knowing that some (or all?) employers penalize resumes that are trying too hard just adds more noise to the many conflicting pieces of information candidates have to consider.
I read that post with interest. It certainly makes some good points. the typo example, certainly.
However; in my experience, certain things do automatically mark out a cv as a poor fit - one of which is "too flashy". This is born out of originally giving everyone a read/shot and finding the flashy ones were, every time, not so good.
I dont agree it is a black box btw; if you do a little googling the advice is fairly standard - keep it to 2 pages, keep it clean and readable, 12pt font.
The idea of fitting a standard model is a good one; making the recruiters life easy is a good thing, and a different looking CV can interrupt your workflow.
I was curious about this. As a student who will be applying for an engineering job one day, I'm not sure what the rules are when it comes to resumes, but I had a feeling that flashy was not the way to go.
That said, some of these look really good. My favorites are the Stars and the Shearling Point options, both of which are just subtle enough for my tastes. Best of luck to Mr. Caldwell in his future endeavors.
From what I've heard from my recruiter friends, you want to prioritize flow, readability, and scan-ability over flashy.
Recruiters are often at-times swamped with thousands of resumes (and even more at big companies). They'll spend at most 5 minutes scanning your resume to see if you are a good fit.
I am amazed that this business works. I'm not saying it's a bad product, but rather that there doesn't appear to be much of a product market fit.
Here's why: the fields that would see value in creative resumes like these are creativity driven fields - specifically graphic design, web development, visual design, print design, frontend, etc. Creative resumes can be valuable in these fields because they are a means to showcase relavent skills. If I'm applying for a job as a graphic designer, I would be stupid not to take advantage of the blank canvas that is a resume.
Concurrently, non design related fields likely do not see much value in a well designed resume, simply because it is unimportant and irrelevant. Yeah, the resume stands out from the pack, but surely this does not influence hiring decisions? Surely whoever is reading these resumes is not impressed by a bit of color and typography? Though I am probably being naive here - every little bit helps, especially when there are hundreds or thousands of other resumes to compete against.
So with that, if one assumes the highest demand for creative resumes is in creative fields, then this is like selling ice to eskimos. Designers can - and should - design their own creative resumes to market themselves.
But clearly I am wrong. So I wonder how well these resumes will convert? Somebody should A/B test and report back :)
Just because someone is in a non-design field doesn't mean they don't appreciate design. Even though two resumes might say the same thing in text, the better designed one will convey important information more efficiently.
By standing out, you show your potential employer that you cared enough to spent some time (or money) on trying to impress them.
While I completely agree with your point that a good design is important, I hope there's nobody on a tight budget reading this and thinking "damn now I have to spend $100 to keep up with the market".
My CV consistently receives praise. My secret? A standard Microsoft Word template that I have never seen anybody else use despite reviewing plenty of CVs myself :)
The psychology at work here is not unfamiliar to me. I once came up with lots and lots of reasons why I could not ship things. Then I stopped and shipped things. I suggest you ship things.
Life has brought me into contact with many folks who have side projects, for many values of "side project" and many levels of success. "Raw talent" explains very little of their difference from other people.
- I can really see this type of service blowing up, once you find the right product/market/fit.
- The slider above-the-fold on the 'shop' tab distracts me from the rest of the page. It wasn't intuitive to me that I could scroll down to begin shopping.
- A simple filter would be a great addition to the 'shop' page. It'd be nice to filter by type (e.g business, creative, etc.), price or design (rustic, elegant)
- I wonder if you would see more sales if you tried a/b testing your pricing model a bit. Is there a reason why you charge the extra $5.00 for edits? If the shopper pays $99 to own the theme, shouldn't he be entitled to edit it as much as he pleases?
- You're looking for resume writers. Have you connected with Hagan Blount? I believe he designs Infographic resumes. (http://haganblount.com/resume). Some of your designs require users to highlight a quote, etc., and I wonder if they could use help writing out these areas.
- Any suggestions on how to make it intuitive to scroll down?
- We've thought about filtering but we've honestly seen no trends in which professions pick which designs - it's been all over the board.
- The shopper doesn't own the theme. Due to the copyright agreements that we have with the designers who created the resumes and the font foundries who created the typefaces, we aren't able to release the source files to be edited. Also, most folks don't have or can't use inDesign, which is what we use to typeset the resumes. We've tried to keep the price of edits low at $5 as a service to our customers because in early testing, we came across this as an objection. People need to revise their resumes or have different versions. We wanted to reduce friction there. We obviously don't make money on this but we just think it makes good business sense and is good customer service.
- We don't want to get into writing resumes. Instead, we'd rather partner with resume writers. They have a captive audience that's shown they're willing to pay for resume services. We'd rather get referrals from them than compete with them.
re: suggestions on how to make it intuitive to scroll down:
On the shop page: An anchor link that sits above-the-fold with a call-to-action like "start shopping" or "browse designs" would probably make it more intuitive. Anything that shows me a peak of what's below-the-fold would help.
Since the main slider occupies all of the above-the-fold real estate and has its own horizontal navigation, I just assumed I was 'done' with the page once I had scrolled through each slide.
1. How did you manage to get all these awesome resume templates?! That's fairly impressive for a one month project.. I could have had only one of them and I would be proud!
2. There's no talk about the 10,000$ in the blog.. where does it come from? Is it 100 sales? Is it less but with more urgent need (For instance, clicking "1 day" or "custom color").
3. About the process of converting the html template to a pdf.. how does it work and how good is it? For instance, is it a simple html->pdf which could give ugly conversion or end-of-page text to be displayed wrongly on the next page?
And as a suggestion, it'd be interesting to give a demo of the cv. For instance, I'd enter my data, it'd show me the resume but with a clear "Demo" written on each page of the pdf.. or something similar.
1) The project wasn't 1 month. This is just what we did in the roughly 1 month since we launched.
2) Yes, if you multiply the over 100 sales by our purchase price, we did over $10,000.
3) We don't convert html to PDF. Customers pick a resume design, upload their resume content (in Word or TXT or whatever,) and then we custom typeset it and send them a PDF as a digital file. Our graphic artists are great at making multiple pages look outstanding. There's also a revision process to make sure it pleases the customer.
4) The demos are really the designs you see on the site. Since all of our resumes are custom-typeset in inDesign by a graphic artist, we can't demo a customer's actual resume until we go through the entire process.
I think you should market your manual process more aggressively. Generating from templates is easy and cheap, but that a professional graphic artist is doing it, makes quite a difference.
I just e-mailed this to them, but how they get regular sales leads is through the Universities. The universities want to get their students jobs, and if you have a real value-add service that will do that, they should have no problem posting your link and being aware of you in their offices. Your startup should be the first thing mentioned by their Career Development offices and resume courses when students ask "how do I get a job?". It won't be easy to get in front of all of them, but I bet you can get the ball rolling really fast with this exceptional product.
Why is this getting downvoted? He's only describing what they do: the visual design. Presumably, the customer prints the résumé. Is that correct, dcaldwell?
That's correct. Some people think we do the printing but we actually provide the visual design service. We're considering adding a printing service down the road. Even in doing our photo shoots for the site, we learned a lot about what makes resumes look great in the printed format.
Right now, we send out 2 hi-resolution PDF files - 1 is for full bleed and 1 is for normal printouts on an office or home printer. That way the customer has the option of how they wan to print out the resume.
I'm curious if you found a local pro photographer or diy because the photos look outstanding. They definitely provide a huge level of credibility from my perspective.
The site design itself is really beautiful too. Loft Resumes isn't the only case where I've heard projects getting a lot of useful traffic from CSS galleries.
While in my case (Candy Japan) I'm not sure if the possible improvement in conversions would justify spending money on the design, I wonder if the side benefit of getting listed in CSS galleries would make it worth it.
We actually haven't gotten many orders directly from the CSS galleries. While some designers do order our resumes, they aren't our primary target market (many of them will design their own.)
From our standpoint, it helps out with getting some solid back links for SEO purposes in the beginning and also helps from a referral standpoint. We also just like seeing and spreading great design. We're kind of passionate about that. Some designers will send the link to their non-designer friends because they don't feel like doing it pro-bono for their friend and the money their friend can pay just isn't worth it to create something from scratch.
However, if you have a product or service whose direct customer is designers, then you might be able to get some conversions from the CSS galleries. Your's could be this case.
Congratulations on the launch and the beautiful work you're producing. I'd love to hear your feedback on the very popular discussion from a few days ago here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804134) on Raganwald's blog, "I don't hire unlucky people" (http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-dont-hire-unlucky-people) .
Specifically, I'm curious as to how much you as the creator of this service think making a resume standout really helps an applicant compared to a bland resume from a measurably more qualified candidate? Thanks!
A snippet from the blog...
---
“First, I stopped caring so much about little things like how 'professionally' a resume was formatted or whether the cover email had spelling mistakes. I realized that throwing people away because of a spelling mistakes was really another way of discarding half the resumés because you don’t want to work with unlucky people.”
“Wait,” said Oscar, “but surely all things being equal, the person who takes the time to get the email right is better than the person who doesn’t?”
“Sure,” agreed Ernestine, “But all other things aren’t equal. What if the email with the spelling mistake came from someone who’s really busy because they’re talented and have a lot to do in their current position?”
---
I read that post on Raganwald's blog the other day. I think there's a difference in having a "professional" resume format in standard Word document black and white and having a resume that's been designed by an artist. My guess is that in that story, Ernestine would at least give a Loft Resume a good look - sometimes that little bit is enough - you've stood out and gotten noticed. That can be half the battle if an employer is looking through hundreds of resumes.
Looks like a beautiful site. However I was disappointed to see that nothing about the 10k figure in the link title was mentioned in the article. I would be very interested in another article if you'd be willing to detail your revenue, expenses, profits, conversion rate, and such. I understand that is sensitive data and you may not want to, but it can't hurt to ask.
I'm not sure why the focus here is that they gained that amount of revenue inside of a month. Looking at their traffic chart it seems like the site was never very popular until one specific date when they suddenly jumped to 20,000 users thanks to one highly successful promotion they did. So if anything this is more about how fab.com was really good for them.
Make it automated and mobile: build a beautiful CV from an iPhone app, pay via in-app purchase and get 5 physical printouts delivered (also PDF in email and HTML version hosted for sharing).
1. You're a geek, you prefer computers. Random people who need help with CVs don't see it that way. They take whatever they find.
2. They find the app because it's cool to try and use. Websites are boring and obstruct. Apps generate huge traction way faster. The in-app payments are also easier for users, no credit card forms.
3. Smartphones outsell computers by 20% every day.
4. Once you find a way to make the interface great on a phone, you can deliver to tablets easily.
I think a CV is something you have more investment in; I don't think as many people would be searching on their phones for an app... especially as writing a CV generally happens on a PC.
You're more likely to be sitting in front of a word processor bleakly wondering how to prep it up - and go do some Googling for CV tips...
What's more likely - that you go to a resume builder website when your mate recommends, or download an app? What would you recommend - a cool app, or a website?
Apps are physical and cool. CVs should be fun to do. That's the future. Assuming that the desktop is a primary device for people in 2012 is just wrong. Also, CVs don't need to contain huge amounts of text; better keep it simple.
You're right about apps being popular and continually growing in importance.
However, you're talking about a task (creating/updating a CV) that takes a lot of manual work and editing. It could certainly be automated to a large extent by grabbing existing information from LinkedIn or Facebook or wherever. But when you get down to the details, there's a lot to write. That will never be fun to do in an app.
I can't imagine people caring how "fun" a CV app/website is so long as it helps them get the resume updated and get a new job.
Probably the website since it's more useful for the task. Plus apps aren't cool or physical (unless you mean the touching your phone part). I could see the word-of-mouth factor being higher for an app, but the app would have to work very well for the task and I don't think that's something that would be easy to achieve with the form factor and the fact that most devices deny you a physical keyboard. So maybe something that only requires light editing and pulls most of the data from outside sources?
I see your technical point of view, but the average user market shows something else. People couldn't imagine doing stuff they do on a phone before iPhone. Now they do all sorts of mass content creation and they prefer it.
UI is just a matter of how much energy you put into it. It's not easy, but can be done. See iMovie, mobile bitmap editors, Garage Band... Difficult and unbelievable 5 years ago, but clearly doable.
We have graphic artists that custom typeset the resumes manually. There are 2 revision rounds included in each purchase (additional revisions/edits/versions can be purchased) so there's back and forth with our artists.
You should mention his on your homepage. I assumed that the $99 got me a fill-in-the-blank Word template. Having a designer do the heavy lifting and polish sounds much more appealing. You could also easily upsell to editing and review too.
I noticed you were using Shopify. You could probably add a lot to that $10,000 by selling a varient of your store's design on the Shopify theme store. It looks awesome.
Emory, my cofounder, designed the website and a few of the resumes. We contracted with some really talented designers regionally and around the country for the rest of the resumes. We didn't want to have the same look and feel for all of them so we plan to continue to use a variety of great designers.
How did you go about finding these designers? I've had some success finding correct designers on odesk, but it can be quite hard and time-consuming to find a good fit (and it really depends on your budget, in your case you can afford to hire expensive top-notch designers I guess).
Love the idea, and your products look amazing. I've definitely got the site bookmarked if (when?) I ever need to hit the job market again.
My only concern with these types of resumes is that I've heard stuff like this can't be read by automated resume parsers used by some companies. I don't know how true that really is, does anyone know?
That's certainly been brought up to us before. We've run our resumes through parsing software and they've actually performed well. We don't advertise that because we haven't run every resume through every parser, so we can't say that they perform as well as Text files. Our advice for folks who are submitting to places where resume parsing software may be used is that they have a text version of their resume on hand as well and then use the Loft Resume for interviews and emails.
Most statistics show that 70% of jobs are found through personal networking, while 30% are found through career boards (like Monster.com.) We feel like we fit well with those 70%. However, even within the 30% of jobs that are found through career boards, most of those end in an email and an interview. We think a Loft Resume is a great way to stand out when job candidates do land that interview.
Do you really want to work for a company that uses automated resume parsers?
I would understand if they asked for one of the various specialized XML dialects out there (HR-XML, XMLResume etc), but in my (limited) experience, nobody does.
Great stuff. I hope you earn more advertising/publicity from that blog post than you earn copycats.
May I suggest that you add more single column resumes. Having multiple columns and boxes etc. is something I associate with newsletters and magazine articles. If I was shopping, I probably wouldn't buy one like that.
I'd be really interested to see how you phrased the emails you sent out to the bloggers to get them to write about you, and what your success rate was.
The resumes are very attractive. However, in my experience looking at resumes I put 0-1% of the weight on attractiveness. Maybe it's more useful for other fields, however.
I could see such a resume getting a positive response in design related professions, but in my field (biotech), it would get a negative response. The immediate thought would be "why??"
It would have been great to have some retargeting advertising going the whole time. It can be very cheap and makes people on average 70% more likely to convert.
We just launched about a month ago and have been doing our best to keep up with orders so haven't had time to do proper surveys. That's certainly something that we want to do in the near future. I think it would really help from a marketing perspective - having some great success stories. I actually got the idea for the business because a friend of mine hired a graphic artist to design his resume and he ended up getting a ton of call and interest - many of them saying that they were impressed with his designed resume.
congrats, great service! if you are considering video promotion, i'd suggest to compare google tv with my service virool.com We are better and cheaper. ping me and i will make you discount and give you some free credits. i can also recommend few production companies in case you want to create nice and inexpensive clip about your service.
This tendency will keep growing and eventually an average resume will include a 20 minute video with music and interviews with all your previous bosses and co-workers; ending with fireworks that create the company logo and a bunch of cheer leaders screaming your name.... and eventually companies will get tired of it and just ask everyone to send _only_ a plain text version.
I have a friend who remarks that in his case career is only ever a verb.
Personally I suspect that his approach to the world of work will result in a hell of a lot more personal fulfillment for him throughout his life than any amount of sucking up to corporate toss will ever do.
Sorry to be negative. Again, the designs are very cute, but not "professional". My experience is limited to high-tech hiring.