JobSpice (YC S09) Makes Resumes Web Friendly, With A Facebook Co-Founder | Hacker News Reader

JobSpice (YC S09) Makes Resumes Web Friendly, With A Facebook Co-Founder

techcrunch.com

81 pointssuhail59 comments

This seems pretty cool. I actually had an idea for almost exactly this.

The revenue model writes itself too. Thousands of people pay resume professionals for editing help every day. JobSpice could have a third party network of resume pros ready to help, and take a cut of the payments.

So it's free to write your awesome looking resume, and for a reasonable fee it's trivial to have a resume doctor look it over.

The consumer business model that you described is a small part of JobSpice's potential. The goldmine comes from getting companies to use JobSpice to recruit new hires. All individuals want to create beautiful resumes but once the resume is created there's no telling where the individual goes with said resume.

JobSpice has the resume meta-data at its finger tips. The logical next step would be to get companies to offer jobs to JobSpice's users.

This idea is not new, but their implementation is new. Now I believe that some web ideas can differentiate truly based on "usability". Same market, many competitors, but if you have killer usability, then you've a chance to win.

Not much different from our last LaunchBox Digital -funded venture Razume.com. We had nice "review layers" as our unique feature. In effect, community reviewed resumes.

This space is really hard. Revenue model certainly does not write itself, when there's dozens of similar free services around. We tried by pushing to SaaS to B2B (Career Centers), but ultimately didn't get the funding which we would've needed to bring support & sales to acceptable level for big players such as universities.

If you're interested in our venture's post mortem, watch this interview: http://www.junloayza.com/interviews/how-to-transition-form-t...

I just checked out the site and it truly impressive. Everything looks sharp and I like the clean design. Everything is easy to use and I can go in and change the CSS later if I want to. I started filling out some information to get a feel and I really liked it!

I tried to sign up, but there is no way to register! Did I miss something there?

you register when you're ready to save your résumé

I tried to save last night and it simply said that I had a wrong username/password combo. The only action available was printing to pdf form. I just tried again and it did allow me to register though. Was something changed or maybe I missed something late last night....

I have been meaning to update my resume for a while now and this is the perfect tool to launch me into action.

(this means click the floppy disk)

You may want to make it more obvious that you registering/saving is actually creating an account.

Also, please introduce an auto-save feature.. it would have been very annoying if it didn't save properly! In fact, I was thinking, while using the product, "I am going to be so annoyed if it doesn't save properly!" - That makes for bad customer experience :)

I think a Word export would be key here. Many large firms and recruiting agencies require you to provide Word format resumes and have large internal systems and processes based on Word documents.

Yeah, we'd obviously love to have this, but the Word formatting engine is horrendous... just try taking any html document and importing it into Word and see what it looks like.

Hopefully, we can eventually replace those large internal systems that process Word documents with real tools that can search and categorize the structured data.

You could have some sort of "degraded" resume version in .rtf. It seems like .rtf is decent, but doesn't have as much customization as a word document. Of course, I could be wrong. It's not the best solution, but it is something that can be passed around from person to person, edited, and even re-imported with much less fuss than trying to use a Word document.

However, any time someone does that, that's a part of the process that isn't taking place on JobSpice.

"However, any time someone does that, that's a part of the process that isn't taking place on JobSpice."

This is the real reason not to offer Word export. They can try to convince HR departments to use JobSpice for their resume filtering and searching needs, instead of just a place to download resumes into their internal systems and never returning to use other services.

A noble goal, but it seems very unlikely. Shifting Fortune 1000 companies or large recruiting firms to use a whole new system would be an amazingly unlikely and long-time framed change. Best of luck if that's your goal though, it would be an improvement.

Until then though, lack of Word export is a liability for people who build their resumes on your site.

I wonder if perhaps scripting Open Office could be doable? I have looked (briefly) into the Open Document standard (I think that was the name), but it seemed too painful to me. I have some faint hope that creating word documents via the Open Office scripting API could be easier.

That is, rather than trying to create valid XML, just call a method on an empty open office doc that say 'creteHeading("abc")'

And so on... Of course probably it won't work, but it is the only hope I see on the horizon. (My problem is actually going from LaTex to Word).

Agreed that the Word formatting engine is horrendous.

However, one thing you might want to do is just generate a "standard format" Word doc (without all the fancy layout/design/template). This way, those that really, really need a Word version (or think they do), will have it.

Won't most companies accept PDF these days? Their systems should be able to search those as well...

Congrats Andrew and Dane on the launch.

Many recruiters want a Word document so they can easily censor your contact information and plaster their own on top.

Not to mention rewrite it, add skills, etc.

Perhaps that request is a good sign to stay away from those types of people then...

I don't think I'm alone in saying it: I would never work for a company that required a Word resume.

Unless maybe you need the money and can not find another job? If you can be picky about the companies you work for, you probably don't need an online resume generator anyway?

True that. I was scouring job ads, and found some that required me to copy-paste my resume into the body of an email.

Yeah, we're working on making "plaintext" styles right now. Even ASCII could use a little JobSpice love.

What's the deal with the /static/{js|css}/combined.(hash) stuff? Is that part of a home-brewed deployment solution?

Yeah, we implemented a build process that combines and minifies all the CSS and JS files, and also converts all the images to sprites to cut down on requests. The hash is to facilitate more efficient caching (you can set it to never expire).

I've been toying with the idea of open-sourcing it, but it would definitely need some cleanup first.

Emurse.com has had Word/PDF/RTF export for years.

Yeah, but their templates are specifically designed by them with this in mind, which is why there are only a handful to choose from and they aren't very interesting.

Since we allow anything that can be done with CSS, and allow people to upload their own templates, the problem of exporting to different formats is significantly more difficult.

Good job, looks like something linkedin should have had ages ago.

I took some time and put my .doc resume into LaTeX, figuring that with judicious use of functions, I could easily change styles and formatting. I used pdfLaTeX to output to pdf. Of course now, very few job boards take a .pdf, and of course, no recruiters do. It's a very frustrating process, made worse by the knowledge that changing my format to something more useful for me now requires me to keep two resumes, both the .pdf and the .doc versions.

Lack of "register" totally threw me.

Especially when I clicked save and there was only one password field, and no confirm.

That's never a good idea.

God forbid they make it easy =)

The problem comes when you make a typo on your password at registration time. Then you're left trying to reset your password.

I started thinking how hard can it be to build a web resume? But your implementation bowled me over. Kudos guys. Great job.

I would suggest to make it obvious that users have a URL that they can share. Give suggestions during signup for their preferred web address. eg: http://jobspice.com/firstname

Goodluck to you.

Great idea, and the editor looks nice! Really want them to hire a designer to do some good templates...you could rock PDF output a lot.

ass-kickingly delicious

way to go fellas

we should celebrate over beers when you're done dealing with all the traffic

Congrats on the launch!

Love the app, and like how you just "jump right in".

However, you might want to have some minimal information about the company/team (even if it's just a link from the bottom right corner). That way, if some fancy VC wants to give you a big check, they know where to reach you.

Is there a Posterous or something? The twitter account is private...how are we supposed to learn about updates?

I think next to the button that says "Login/Logout" it might be nice to have a simple welcome message that says "Welcome, <username>" just to reassure users that they are in fact logged in. I didn't realize I was still logged in until I noticed the button said "Logout".

Gotta give you some Hacker News love as well. Congrats on launching dudes, well done.

I'm really digging this, nice work!

Just one question/issue: when browsing styles in Chrome, one of the styles seems to be cut off by the column divider, and only shows as "Impossible I...".

Is JobSpice written in Python? If yes, are you using any framework?

Is there any way to preview how stuff looks without having to manually enter data first? Just so I can get a feel with some test data?

You can look browse the available styles in the Styles tab.

Yeah when I tried that it was blank unless I had already entered my personal data.

Looks great. Is there a way to make the Experience section details project-based in addition to company-based?

You can use the "custom" section to add subheadings -- which could be projects

I've been waiting for a real competitor to VisualCV to show up, and shown up it has. Congrats on the launch!

Is there a link on the site or an email account where we can leave customer comments/suggestions?

nice idea. awesome implementation, straight forward yet good looking. best of luck!

I liked the design. But i wonder how this is any different from emurse.com?

I think execution (i.e. quality of design, ease of use, pricing -- if any, etc.) is what matters on this one, so we'll see how they compare as JobSpice matures. Emurse is really handy, though. I've used it before!

Dane and Andrew: Congrats on launching!

Well done. I like this a lot.

maaan, I just started doing research into doing something like that... crap.

Congratulations on launching.

I filled out my resume, and it only took about ten minutes, which is awesome. I was actually about to hire a designer from Craigslist to spice up my resume (no joke, I've been emailing people today) so this is a nice synchronicity.

Unfortunately, some small formatting bugs make this completely unusable. My username is "zack" if you want to check it out.

Otherwise, an excellent product. I would like to have been able to add details to the Achievements section.

What's the deal with the /static/{js|css}/combined.{hash} stuff? Is that part of a home-brewed deployment solution?

I Love It!

Maybe its not as infinitely customizeable as microsoft word, but I did in 10 minutes what took over an hour of painful moving crap around in word.

Ugh HTML/CSS is just so much easier to style. Maybe I should just learn latex and get my problems over with.

I guess this doesn't work for the majority of the population but I have a simple nice looking LaTeX template for my CV.

Anytime I need to update it it's usually a question of a few minutes tops. It might've taken a bit longer for the initial setup but over time I'm sure I've saved way more time compared to fighting Word every time I want to update it. I highly recommend it.

Very smart way to create (and then resale) a big HR database.

It also should be integrated with HN, like standard button/link in user's profile.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com