Show HN: Convert your LinkedIn profile to a resume | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Convert your LinkedIn profile to a resume

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48 pointsprodtorok64 comments

Why isn't there an XML or JSON format widely used for CVs? It would make sifting through CVs so much easier, plus it would make CVEO (CV engine optimization) a thing.

I have used this in the past, https://jsonresume.org and can vouch for it. Probably this is exactly what you mean

For our data model we started with https://jsonresume.org/ but needed to adapt a bit.

Ideally there would be something on https://json-schema.org/ (as there are for industry job posting standards)

Creator of JSON Resume here, would love to see your adaption if possible.

Is this better than the "save to pdf" feature on your profile in LinkedIn?

Yes, we explicitly aim to enhance what is provided in that PDF; providing the same structure of detail.

Yes, it scrapes your data and retains it an undefined amount of time and also feeds it into an OpenAI LLM: https://www.iubenda.com/privacy-policy/57845026/full-legal

I have no idea why one wouldn't instantly go ahead and install this extension /s

We are very clear about you sharing your data, requiring you to select a checkbox. And we are compliant with both LinkedIn's and Chrome Web Stores terms about user data.

Also, we do not scrape any data explicitly. At no point in time do we read data from the linkedin api nor html.

I'm not sure how one would get "AI-Enhanced Professional Writing" without feeding it into an LLM. This isn't underhanded, it's literally the product being offered.

The parent isn't being sarcastic about it being underhanded; they're implying that "AI-Enhance Professional Writing" and "enhanced content" regarding LLMs rewriting your resume isn't necessarily desirable, especially at the expense of losing control of your data.

I would be shocked if LinkedIn isn't already being scraped for training data given Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI. Even setting that aside, this is presumably data which you have already chosen to share publicly for anyone with a LinkedIn account to see. How many people really have concerns about sharing it with another third party?

That's a pretty cold take. If the extension did not need info from linkdin that is not publically available it would not be an extension.

And second, I am not ok with my info outside of my control even if it's public. I might change my mind about it being public, or I might want to change part or all of it. Good luck doing that after it's been fed to an LLM, even IF the company adheres to the GDPR and has not been resold several times along with your data.

How great is it then that you aren’t using the extension?

Get off your high horse.

It’s a fun little extension that accelerates a process a million people are likely using chatgpt for weekly.

Yea you get an ATS friendly template that isn’t a colored doubled column resume

Well that, but also enhanced content (we use AI)... and then a word document you can actually edit

Looks interesting and could not have come at a more convenient time for me (.. unfortunetaly). I’ll give it a try. Thanks

Hopefully it at least provides a nice place to start from! And saves you time...

If it comes out any decent, lmk and we'll give you some credits for the paid service. The UX around tailoring resumes isnt as intuitive.

You can do some free tailoring on the home page as well, this ux is straight forward: cvgist.com

Tried to use the tool and it never worked (just no reaction after clicking on the "generate" button). Disabled the adblocker to see if it was the cause but with the same result. Getting a "'Save to PDF' button not found " error in console.

Not sure how to fix it. Thought you might like to know.

It looks like it taps into the LinkedIn pdf resume. Do you have the ability to download that on your profile? There is a button on everyone’s profile (usually) in the header section called “resources”

That might be related to me using a localized version (FR_CA) of LinkedIn because I do have this option in "resources".

OH! Localization... sorry we are reliant on english semantic mapping. OK, we will look for a solution.

Quick extraction, nice resume formatting and free which is cool. I know LinkedIn depreciated their free resume builder.

Neat, but how does it differ from other tools out there? e.g. https://www.kickresume.com/en/linkedin-resume-builder/

1. Our's is a free extension with no login required.

2. It's not clear how these tools grab this data without some direct integration with LinkedIn or Violation of their terms

3. We use AI to craft resume language, Kick Resume is a copy/Paste

4. We provide a word doc you can download and edit yourself.

>Our's is a free extension with no login required.

So, the people installing this extension are the product then?

There's a paid premium tier.

They mention ads

Nice work - wish this was around a couple of years ago when I got out of uni. Keep it up.

Does anyone still enjoy writing, rewriting and designing their own CV by hand, for example using Latex? Shouldn't it be a signature, a testament to your sense of individualism and craftsmanship?

I still use muse + emacs lisp to generate my CV into html and pdf (via Latex with custom template)

I stopped caring about that when companies started using Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to evaluate resumes based on keywords and other silly criteria without ever having a person actually review it.

Fair. But when you land the face to face interview with the hiring manager and peers, I think it's still good to have a nicely designed CV. And with nicely designed I don't mean lots of graphics and colors, but something that was thought out to read well.

I'm not sure anyone more than glanced at my resume for the past few decades. My interviews were basically through people I had worked with in some fashion.

For what it's worth, there's only one CV in all of history that I can remember: the "My Little Pony" themed one that went viral around 2013.

When getting feedback about my CV from coworkers, my impression is that very few of the people who personally interviewed me ever read my CV before hiring me — recruiting websites like LinkedIn, Xing, talent.io, honeypot.io genuinely seem to have replaced the CV in many cases.

(If you're wondering how I managed to get that kind of feedback from those specific people, it's all the times places have run out of money or the investors wanted a completely different direction with no iPhone app).

I think that's pretty much the reality for mid+ level jobs and it really pisses off people for whom "networking" etc. isn't their preferred path.

This is probably orthogonal to the conversation but I’ve found (later in life) that networking is the single most important thing you can do if you want to find success in business. That’s how I advise younger folks to see the world too.

As an introvert this has been a painful lesson to learn, but the reality for me is that I’ve only landed jobs at 2 out of the 7 companies I’ve worked for in my tech career where I didn’t know someone that would vouch for me from the inside.

I won't say you can't have success applyling blind to job-boards. But, especially, if you're not some cookie-cutter search skills, you're probably playing the "game" on hard level. Yes, some people will win anyway but lots of others will win out because they have a connection.

You should bring copies of your resume with you anyways, interviewers always seem to ask for them. You can provide the "nice" copy then.

This is one of the things I enjoy the most these days, but I also had quite a lot of fun with it back in the day... I just looks for designs online and then I reproduce as much as I can using other tooling... I enjoy doing this for anything print, like magazines and corporate image documents too...

Every now and then, I get an itch from the old days of desktop publishing. A while back there was release of a "lost" Bram Stoker short that got transcribed to text (several players using different methods posting their results on github). I fired up InDesign which I had never used, and did a book layout of it. All because I was bored and wanted to think about something other than ; {} [] for a bit. At least I didn't have to fire up the Quadra to run Quark!

Enjoy? Not really, but I do it anyways so it looks the way I want.

I was the founding site lead of a Polish office of U.S. tech company, with an initial target of a hundred developers. After looking at… many resumes I realized I strongly disliked custom resumes. As much as I wanted to appreciate uniqueness and creativity, it got in the way. What I really wanted was something as standard and easy to read as possible. Ideally a LinkedIn profile.

Don’t get me started about cute resumes that were written as code, etc. I hated them and hated myself for how much I hated them.

Something something json resume :)

I did. I had a nice TeX or LaTeX hand-tuned one-pager. Yes, "C++" was a macro, to subdue those ridiculous huge '+' characters, there was no Computer Modern Roman, and I made countless other tweaks.

But turned out that shitty ATS software was throwing away my resume, even though it rendered and text-extracted fine, and with normal PDF fonts (not rasterized, like some DVI convertors would do).

Though, one time that the resume got me to an interview battery at a startup, it was a good conversation-starter with their designer, who could tell it was hand-crafted.

Now, I just have a relatively phoned-in two-pager, with lots of search keywords, that I do in LibreOffice. To hopefully get me found by the right serendipitous sourcer/recruiter/manager/founder, and hopefully not have the resume discarded if they pop it into some shitty corporate hiring pipeline system. Nor mangled too badly, if they parse it, and have some people in the process looking only at their shitty parser's output in a Web page.

I'd prefer making the most of one page, but sometimes idealism has to be flexible to the reality on the ground.

I did mine by hand using plain HTML+CSS (using A4.css, then rendered to a 2-page PDF) and my employer remarked that it was a sign of attention to detail and care that many other candidates won't even bother with.

I'd argue I spent more time trying to fit everything in two neat pages than actually writing down the resume.

At least it shows I know flexbox, or something. It's mostly a backend position anyway.

Unfortunately, I've found a negative correlation between CV creativity and candidate quality.

I've got various theories as to why, but in my experience most people with non-standard resumes have turned out to be weaker candidates than people who just type their stuff into a standard template with something approaching the STAR format.

Real pros are busy solving real problems in my experience, taking days or weeks to craft a resume doesn't even occur to people at the top typically. I've gotten high level jobs without submitting a resume, application or almost anything else because the exec recruiters did all of the leg work for me. I think a lot of high performers are familiar with that too.

Nope. It's a list of shit that I've done, organized in the most effective way to get someone to hire me.

(I hope that) I'm a far more interesting person than my resume would suggest. Unfortunately, no one hiring engineers would put that at the top of the list.

I've interviewed enough people to know what matters, so I highlight that. The fact that I once fell asleep underwater will have to come up at another time.

I do! Using LaTeX is how I track changes to my resume, look at historic resumes, and keep it all in commits within git, tagging "releases" I send out.

My process is update resume, git commit, git push, then update LinkedIn or whatever social site I want beyond that. The LaTeX files then become the single-source-of-truth.

https://csswizardry.com/csscv/!

> using Latex

Sorry no. It took me two days to fix a template I got from the internet to display all the writing systems I want. Plus I had a manually fix a hardcoded value in the bibliography template to use French while I had to use the bibliography in an English context so references don't get screwed with space inserted before colons. My dissertation is filed \foreignlanguage{xxx}{yyy} and \textit and I hate it.

> you should... / git gud

No. I have something to write, in addition to all the other things I do, and any time searching for commands or packages online to make things work is pure wasted. If Word had a better CVS and modular story I would have gladly stick with it.

I hand wrote mine as HTML tables. There is custom CSS but imo it looks fairly good without CSS (such as inside Emacs). http://omg-lily.xyz

It froze for me. Stuck on this screen: https://imgur.com/a/CH30zoK

hmm weird, do you mind sharing your profile? Or try refreshing that page it could be a cloudflare issue... we have to protect against the endpoint to avoid financial ddos.

For me, it just says "failed to generate preview" at that same screen .

i’ve been quietly on the job market the last month or so, and i’ve been kind of surprised at the number of recruiters who insist they need an “actual resume” instead of linkedin profile, which honestly has been my resume for about 15 years now. i finally dropped a PDF of my profile into claude and got a resume condensed, but i have a hard time seeing the advantage in this day and age.

I need the exact opposite direction. It's so incredibly tedious to populate LinkedIn.

No one is concerned this sends your LinkedIn ID and PDF to their own server to "generate" the PDF? Surely that data is being stored (and probably sold).

Can you share the github/sourcecode for the extension or unminify it? Code shouldn't be minified in V3 extensions anyway.

I'm not sure how to mitigate the data selling concern or what to show you there. But we're trying to upsell a paid service via nice free utility. We send your data to use AI to generate the resume, that is part of the deal. So if you wouldn't give your data to ChatGPT, don't give it to us (delete it from linkedin also - because your principles sound weak while you let it reside there). We store the data so that paid users can reference their linkedin profiles. Feel free to request a delete and we'll do so with adequate proof: support at cvgist dot com.

Google in fact allows minified code, not obfuscated.

Using LinkedIn is a highly desired feature in the resume builder business. Highly successful firms are using 3rd party services that scrape your profile (already have) without your consent.

So, no, you can parse the minified code all you like - the advantage we have with my implementation is competitors spend minutes scraping while we dont need to. - Which as you've inherently figured out, is not that insightful. - The extension codebase is small and doesnt communicate with any server

Your extension works on people's profiles that are not your own (if you paid for the enterprise ability, according to the extension's code). So is this not aiding with scraping peoples' data?

this looks nice! i did try to sign up for standard a few times and each time i get an infinite loading screen after hitting 'complete purchase'

Oh, weird. That link typically directs you direct to Stripe.

I'll try it.

This looks like a superb tool.

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