Accredible - Reusable and beautiful startup job applications | Hacker News Reader

Accredible - Reusable and beautiful startup job applications

accredible.com

59 pointsdannyking39 comments

I feel it doesn't really hurt the candidate in my mind to use a service like this—provided I also get a very personalized email / cover letter.

The execution here really looks pretty good. However, as a business, I have two concerns:

1. I am generally wary of "life event businesses": things like job searching, weddings, etc. Why? Because the already hard prospect of customer acquisition is now even harder: Not only do you have to reach your target market, you have to catch them right at the point of need. It's a rapidly closing window. I think you'll hear a lot of: "Looks great, I'll take a further look when I start to think about changing jobs".

2. All the money to be made in the jobs industry is paid by the employers. I think you might be trying to target the wrong party. It's really tough to find good candidates, and employers are ready and willing to pay $1,000 to recruiting firms for the right candidate. Plus, larger companies are almost ALWAYS hiring, so there's no "event window" like described above. I'm not sure what your revenue model is, but I'd certainly look to be earning revenue from the employers and keep the service free to the job seekers.

Our intention is to charge on the employer side to search for and be matched to candidates if job seekers opt-in to making their profiles searchable (think OKCupid for recruiters with actual evidence of skills & experience for you to browse through) . The idea is that the cards that you use for job applications can be generalized and turned into a profile (either public or private) to show to future stakeholders as well as for reuse in future job applications but that you can create new cards for new projects, courses, etc. without having to apply for a job at the same time. We've had some good ongoing activity with users in our closed beta who are using Accredible as a way to track their ongoing learning (especially MOOCs - most of our early beta testers came through the Coursera forums) and using it for much more personal reasons - almost like a trophy cabinet of their learning. So we think we have a good chance at avoiding the trap of users only using it for life events. Appreciate your thoughts on this - thanks!

I think the cards are, at least as presented on the landing page, really elegant and sharp looking. I would present my career related information this way.

Constructive Criticism/ Devilishly Advocating:

In agreement with root comment, it's much saner to target employers, which you seem to agree with. Therefore, it seems like presentation of the information doesn't really matter to employers looking to fill a role when compared to how easily searchable, filterable, and readable (both machine and human) that information is.

Therefore, having the service become something more of a "General purpose learning tracking" tool feels at odds with this. Inherently increasing the noise in your system and making it harder for employers to find experts that possess the skillset to meet their need.In other words, it seems like general purpose accomplishment tracking would increase the noise (as presented to employers) and diminish the signal employers are willing to pay for. Have you noticed this issue or given any thought to how to handle it?

Of course, I'm not privvy to your back-end or what you're presenting to employers; the above criticism was just my first thought based on your reply.

Thanks for the kind words! The feedback is much apprecaited too. It's currently used largely as a learning tracking tool by our beta community (we intend to launch the open beta early Q1 2014!). We started to focus on the employer side a lot earlier than we had planned due to user feedback and encouragement from startup employers (we wanted to avoid the chicken/egg situation, which is why we focused on building up the consumer side as a learning tracking platform first). Keeping people's data searchable, filterable and readable is certainly top of our minds as we flesh this side out and this is indeed one of our bigger challenges at the moment. We are still working out the best way to tackle this without sacrificing too much flexibility, but at the moment (with a smallish user base) a system of tagging your cards and narratives with skills and then backing that up with a combination of attached evidence and references (using LinkedIn profiles to verify referee identity) for credibility seems to be working pretty well.

Maybe my mindset is too far from the startup scene to understand the appeal, but personally I would not be impressed by an applicant who uses a resume-as-a-service system. At least not any more than I would someone who copy-pastes a resume from about.com or something similar.

Thanks for the feedback! We are hoping to make it easier for people to be able to show their personality and passions and to tailor their job applications to each opportunity by making it quick and easy to create a narrative as to why they'd be great for the job, backed up with actual evidence that you can flick through, rather than just a resume-as-a-service. We see it more as cover-letter replacement than a resume replacement to that effect (the idea is you'd attach your resume to this).

Kudos for the cover letter replacement. Maybe you could state it clearer on the website?

Thanks - we are still trying to figure out the best way to describe this. We'll work on updating the copy to better reflect that :)

Agreed, it definitely makes more sense to me if you think of it as a cover letter replacement.

I still think, however, that as a potential employer I would have a hard time getting over the bias of thinking "oh, he just used a tool to generate this." Not sure how you could escape that outside of allowing users to heavily customize the appearance and experience, as well as self-host the end product and remove any links or references back to Accredible.

> with actual evidence that you can flick through

"flick" makes me think you're seeing this in a mobile context.

I'd be curious to hear more on the market research you did that suggested pursuing a causal, mobile model for consumption of job applicants' materials.

We haven't decided to specifically focus on mobile, although one neat use case we had in mind was that an Accredible narrative might be a great thing to take into an in-person interview with you on a mobile or tablet and then using that to illustrate the points that you'd like to make once they ask you to elaborate on your skills, projects, experience and interest. Our primary intended use case however is more on desktop-focused job applications.

The UX refinement sessions for that tablet use case would be crazy fun. The experience would have to be silk if I were going to hinge my new-hire interview on putting it in front of an employer, with no experience on the app, and let them self-direct the exploration. I'd look forward to see how that turned out.

And my latent tech writer OCD-ness compels me to suggest dropping "flick" from your vocabulary in favor of

  [...] with actual evidence that you can interact with.

Initially I would have agreed with you but having graduated in the dot.com bust of 2001, I don't.

I had a hard time getting a first job, especially as I am not good at the sort of bullshit (for want of a better word) you need to put in job applications.

I treated the task as a full time job handing in many applications per week. The ones that asked for a CV were easy (but generally had a low chance of a reply). Or a CV and cover letter (similar reply rate). Then you had the corporates, who wanted an individually tailored example of when you showed leadership, or solved a difficult problem despite many setbacks. (These were a pain in the arse to fill out, but generally I got a far better response rate from these applications). I hated them. That why I studied computers and science. But for every 9 bad days where I couldn't think up anything to put as a good response top these stupid questions, I had a good day, where the "bullshit" would flow. I would come up with a good answer. Not lying, but "bigging up" what I actually had done, and making it sound good.

Once you have done 3 or 4 of those applications forms, the questions they ask aren't so different. So guess what, you can reuse the answers. OK, the answers will need tweaked, but that's what I did. I had a file where I had 20 of these questions, and looked for the most similar and tweaked it to the job description.

Now. I managed that with a text file from what I remember. Is there really a need for an app to do this?

Depends on the job, but having hired people for startups, I'm the same way. I don't want people who want a job. I want people who want this job. So the more generic the application, the more likely it is that I'll ignore it.

Also, polish beyond a certain level is a negative for me. It's sort of like Calvin and Hobbes and the clear plastic binder: http://stephen-coley.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Cal...

Basically, the harder something is marketed to me, the more I assume that the marketing is a necessary cover-up for a flawed product. There's a reason McDonald's spends circa 10% of revenues on advertising. Hint: it's not because there are a lot of people in the US who haven't heard of McDonald's yet.

> Also, polish beyond a certain level is a negative for me...Basically, the harder something is marketed to me, the more I assume that the marketing is a necessary cover-up for a flawed product.

That's an interesting comment. I understand where you're coming from to a certain extent, and I'm not going to suggest that hiring is easy, but you can only be so skeptical or cynical about candidates by nature before it starts to negatively impact your process.

I'm of the opinion that a candidate who has taken the time to put together an impressive, polished showcase of their work, where the showcase is something he or she built (not a third party SaaS service), should start out as a more appealing prospect than a candidate who isn't trying to knock your socks off.

Depends on what the candidate would be doing. If their job is building showcases, sure. Otherwise, maybe they're awesome, or maybe they're just blowing smoke.

If it's a choice between somebody who's focused on making great stuff because that's what the company needs and somebody who is crafting another showpiece for their trophy case, I'll take the one who's less excited about self-promotion. Some of the best people I've hired are terrible at marketing, so I feel like my anti-marketing bias is a way of leveling the playing field.

That's a interesting hiring aproach trade-off.

Would a hiring company prefer to receive a personalized aproach by the candidate? It shows that the candidate is particularly interested in working on that company and took some time and effort to apply. But also may signal that the candidate is only saying what he thinks the company wants to hear, faking himself as a cultural match and etc.

Or would a company prefer to receive an honest, idiosyncratic, but standard candidate resume? It shows more about the candidate, his profile, culture, personality. It looks more honest and straight forward. But also may signal that the candidate is sending the same stuff for dozens of other companies, including some that he just don't care if he is not hired. So he may not really want or care enough to work on that company.

I would guess that nowadays recruiters care more about a resume personalized to them, even if it is telling some white lies or half-truths.

I guess manly it depends on what the recruiter values. I may see this as the equivalent of using a library and not reinventing the wheel. Something I feel is a good attitude to have as a software developer. Another recruiter may feel differently.

(I hate all the people who dogmatically tell you your CV should be this way or that, and you MUST do x in an interview. Interviewers are real people as well. Some people may value technical skills, others may prefer a cultural fit.)

There's no reason even with a standard resume to only have one. You tailor either per company or per position type. For example, for a iOS job, you'll emphasize iOS, maybe Android since it's in a similar space, and de-emphasize any other skills you have.

Resumes are marketing documents, not chronological histories of your life. Still, even as a marketing document it shouldn't lie.

Yes - absolutely. One of the frustrations we often hear when talking to recruiters is that it's difficult to place confidence in anything written in a resume without sitting the candidate down for an interview. We are thinking that by allowing you to attach evidence of each of the claims you make it'll be harder to lie using something like Accredible and at the same time making it easier to add credibility to things that traditionally would be hard to include on a resume such as online courses, self-education and personal projects. With an approach like this, you can actually demonstrate all the work, learning and knowledge you have gained.

I like the site (agree that it looks more Resume aaS versus Cover Letter aaS).

Could you elaborate more on the multiple narratives? If I have a long and sordid job history with multiple industries, am I picking only specific companies/positions that I worked with in my application, or am I picking bullet points within the company? I'm slightly confused why Tom Webb would be an iOS developer, Lead Front end, and Customer Service Manager. Maybe iOS, front end, and something else programming related would better illustrate the example. The example job application doesn't change going between Tom Webb and Tina Zuick to really drive this home.

If I have multiple narratives, do they each have unique URLs?

Thanks! This feedback is super useful for honing our wording. The idea is that you create narratives around each of your key competencies/skills (e.g. programming, design, customer service) - each consisting of cards that outline specific projects, experience or education and then (optionally) back that up with evidence for extra depth. You can then apply to jobs by selecting which of your cards you think are relevant for that particular opportunity and tweak the wording to tailor it to that startup before hitting apply.

We thought it would be cool to be able to showcase yourself, then reuse that with minimal effort later - or just keep around as a way to track your progress as you continue to hone your skills.

You absolutely positively need to switch from a rounded font you are using (Bariol) to something less cute and cuddly. It has no place on any resume, leave alone a technical one.

And it's not "beautiful".

Do you not find massive pushback from employers who require that CVs be in Word format so that they can be uploaded to whatever applicant tracking system is being used?

And I think it's naive to think that startups aren't using ATS when there's lots of free or open source systems available.

We think that focusing on startup (and smaller company) jobs should tend to avoid this type of requirement as they are generally much more flexible and open-minded when it comes to job application format requirements and generally want to see more depth on prospective employees - especially on areas like personality traits and interests, which are hard to express in a traditional resume or cover letter.

As someone in the middle of a lot of hiring, I'd love to see applicants apply with Accredible narratives! (And if you want to send one my way - https://getclever.com/about/jobs)

Thanks, I'll shoot you a mail :)

(Slightly offtopic -- but could you actually say a little about the accredible.com site itself for a moment? Was it constructed using Zurb's Foundation?)

Sure - we are building it using the Grumby frontend framework (http://gumbyframework.com) with Rails & AngularJS

Thanks!

Of course, the reason I ask is because the site design was beautiful and was curious about how a few things were done. Best of luck with accredible!

Thanks - appreciate the kind words :)

Just wanted to say thanks everyone, we really appreciate your thoughts. The open, honest and thoughtful discussion is what makes this community great.

Ouch, there's a few display errors in Chrome on Windows. Not good given the objectives of the service.

Is there? Tested pretty thoroughly here on Chrome - did we miss something? Thanks!

- The "Sign up for early access" input box thats in the last section (not the one in the first section) disappears as you scroll past it.

- screenshots in "Find dream jobs and let jobs find you by telling your story" are left aligned on large monitors (should be centered aligned as they are on smaller resolutions.

- the background image on the first section should load sooner. The text-shadow'd text shows by itself for a couple seconds. the background iamge there should be prioritized over the social buttons and over js etc.

Just my opinion on that last one.

Yeah... I'll just use LinkedIn.

Problem with LinkedIn is that you can say you can do or know anything but you can't necessarily demonstrate it. I agree the power of a recommendation/referral network like LinkedIn is useful, but this product seems to let you show how good you are to others.

That's exactly the idea! We wanted to create a way to back up the claims you make about yourself. The idea originally actually came from a big interest in MOOCs and self-education. We wanted to create a way to be able to use this kind of education in job interviews that would be credible. It shouldn't matter where or how you learned something - just that you did. We also wanted to help people provide extra depth about the learning they did in more traditional settings (like college). For example in my case I studied Computer Science - but what does that mean I can actually do? This is a way to show that in a (hopefully) elegant way whilst keeping it skimmable in under a minute.

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