Show HN: I made a resume generator for developers
bytevitae.com
bytevitae.com
I would love to be able to browse their entire collection with a mark indicating free or Pro.
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.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automatio...
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
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.
I agree. Interestingly, medical school applications (at least in the US) require photos. I'm really not sure why - it seems messed up.
No, I'm not concerned at all with that! There is a full sample preview of each template once you login. I guess I need to put it in the landing to?
As of now, you can download your profile in PDF format with no choices of templates.
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?
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
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 :)
The only case for these fancy resumes is for graphic designers in my view, who should be designing the resume themselves, obviously.
Nowadays I use Overleaf's online tex editor, so I don't even need tex installed to update it.
https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/cv-chandan/vgynfrhc...
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.
It doesn’t have to be an active decision to be racial bias. Could just be your gut, “looks like a good person to me” instinct
I really do think women would get high marks and probably beat out many males in these categories.
Maybe young/old but a resume clearly gives that away.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Foucault would like a word.
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!
(As for shaking hands - it seems to be pretty well established that it is a way of showing that you aren't going for a weapon - https://deepenglish.com/2014/07/handshake-history-listening-...)
If you put some effort into looking nice on a photo, people think you care.
On the other hand, they will see you sooner or later anyway, so there is not much gain but time.
Without knowing more, this seems both easy to cheat and biased towards... people with father's with certain names?
While it may be true for some companies, I've never seen a company do this.
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 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.
edit: typo.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.sharelatex.com/templates/cv-or-resume/fancy-cv [1] http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/09/09/17...
http://blog.gregjotau.com/job/2018/06/05/cover_letter_templa...
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?)
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.
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
Open source represents open source contributions (aka repos).
Well that looks cool and apparently its spot on!
btw, you may need to look into https://notyce.me/resources/sometimes-its-not-you.html tells on the font types you should consider.
Some of your templates look vaguely familiar though.
https://realporthub.herokuapp.com
*Edited for positivity. This is legit cool.
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.
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.
Did you find out why? layout, text style? they need a specific template?
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".
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 recently had to rewrite my resume and found it surprisingly difficult to find any decent templates, so I created my own in Google Docs https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LoPO2A_mZXJTpn90K27FPKU3... . Anyone reading this is welcome to use it.
I used it for the first time last week, and I am on to the second round of interviews.
[ When all else fails, use your dev skills ]
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).
I would not think less of an engineer who used standard components.
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.
https://penguindreams.org/files/2018-SumitKhanna-Resume.pdf
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:
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/183046/how-do-i-deve...
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.
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.
Thank you for the inspiration.
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 :)
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.
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.
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...
Take the time to think about your career and highlight what fits the job I am asking you to do.
To get past HR load up on recent buzzwords but tailor the resume to suit the job is the #1 thing I look for.
Any hint of not putting in the effort and I assume that is your work style.
No way I want someone who cant put in the effort to get the job. You know they will put in less when they do get it.
Users of your tool I would avoid as I want someone who is lazy but works really hard at it :)
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.
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.
If you have time to research hr usernames how many resumes are you really getting through in a week?
I interview for the company on a weekly basis
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?
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.
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 )