Show HN: PatchWork extracts your full career history and writes resumes for you | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: PatchWork extracts your full career history and writes resumes for you

usepatch.work

3 pointsmcohrs5 comments

Every single AI resume tools ask you to upload one resume and then edits it for a job description. The AI is capped by whatever's in that one document, which only represents a sliver of your actual experiences. I was sick of these tools requiring so much work for so little payoff. I wanted a tool that knew my entire career history, every little detail of it, and could generate the best possible resume for every role for me without me having to write a word.

So I built PatchWork. You upload your LinkedIn PDF, + old resumes and cover letters, or you can chat with a bot that takes you through a guided career profile setup flow, and Patchwork builds a single master profile of your complete career history. Every resume after that is generated from scratch using the full profile, not one resume you uploaded.

Once your profile is set up, you just paste a job description and hit generate. PatchWork pulls the strongest combination of your experience for that specific role and generates a complete resume that tells the story the hiring manager is looking for. You can edit it manually, have the AI suggest edits, and then export to a simple but effective ATS-friendly PDF or .docx.

We also have a real buffer that prevents hallucinations from entering a resume. If the AI suggests something not explicitly in your profile, a verification pass flags it for review with a source citation before anything goes into the resume.

I've already used it to apply to ten jobs, and I got 7 interviews after 4 months of radio silence.

Free to try, no credit card required. https://usepatch.work

Happy to answer questions on how the profile build works or the fact-checking architecture.

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I did something similar with https://shortlist.addslift.com/

I've since heard from so, so many people that they aren't getting any bites with traditional job applications, so I've paused active development on it.

My motivations were very similar to yours. I have the personal opinion that there is so much more that we have in our heads that we don't put in our resume/CV and that's the approach I took. You need to come in with a sort of AI biography/career highlight reel on yourself to get the best results. I provided users a template to start from. Yes, your resume is a source of the bio, but there is so much more that job hunters should be drawing from.

That AI biography was the result of another project I was working on.

How do you link the cover letter/resume to a job? Does the user need to come in with a job description in mind? (I didn't try your tool out yet!)

Oh cool! I'm shocked people weren't getting interviews with the resumes. I had gotten zero interviews in four months of applying. Then once I built PatchWork, I applied to ten jobs, I've heard back from 8, and 7 of them have been for interviews.

Cover letter content is linked to a job with AI calls. Most cover letters should say the company and the role that a certain work experience was at, so generally it should be pretty easy for the AI to categorize it. What issues were you running into there?

I originally had it as "upload anything with any career info in it," but that proved to be nearly impossible to parse so I scaled back down to documents with predictable content and structures. I also have an AI chat onboarding option if people would rather chat to set up their profile.

Oh i just looked at your tool and it looks like your tool is extremely complementary to PatchWork... would be cool if people used your tool to find the roles that fit them best, then used PatchWork to generate their best resume for their strongest role matches with a click of a button... Just an idea :) haha

Feel free to get in touch! I'm happy to collaborate to make something greater

I build this completely solo and manage it solo, so feedback would be greatly appreciated! This truly was a tool I built for myself because it didn't exist on the market, and I hope people see value in this approach the way that I do.

Also, any tips on how to reduce AI costs without reducing quality would be great. I've done quite a bit of optimization in that regard but there's a lot I don’t know.

Thanks for reading about my little project!

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