Show HN: VisualCV – A simple way to build parsable resumes for web and print | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: VisualCV – A simple way to build parsable resumes for web and print

visualcv.com

32 pointszthomas17 comments

Sole developer: VisualCV has been around since 2007, we recently acquired it to tackle some of the major pain points we had with resumes. Resumes currently have terrible formatting and can't be parsed very accurately.

Most people don't know this but recruiters in large corps rarily read through any of the resumes that comes in. Almost all applications are first parsed by one of the four major resume extraction vendors (sovren, resume mirror, burning glass, daxtra) then dumped into an applicant tracking system. Usually a resume is looked at only when someone does a keyword search on their database. While the process does extract majority of the content it still garbles up a lot of sections that people have spent hours painstakingly editing.

The industry seems to be stuck in a crazy process where it takes structured data turn it into a generally unstructured format (pdf, docx) and use another set of service to try to parse it back again.

We have a unique opportunity to actually work with one of the major resume extraction vendors and start to embed hrXML meta data into a pdf resume so that it can perfectly extracted. We are giving all our pro designs away for free for the next week and we'd appreciate any feedback!

My About.me just expired, I think I just found my replacement. Looks good so far.

Portfolio aspect could be slightly better. I'd like to add links to open source projects of mine but it doesn't look like you support links with descriptions as portfolio items. An HTML import option would be nice as well. I know many people, myself included, that publish their resume as another HTML page somewhere on their domain. If you design the import editor just right you don't even have to do any extra magic to figure out the structure and you can simply ask the user to tag elements as education, experience, etc.

@TOS linked from sign up page (https://www.visualcv.com/www/site_information/professional_t...): 404...

@CV samples (https://www.visualcv.com/cv-templates/best/resume-samples): layout borked in horizontal view on chrome 38.0.2125.114 for android 4.4.4. Ref: http://imgur.com/x105xgA

General thoughts: it wasn't (or rather isn't) immediately obvious for tipsy-me what payment model you are going for (subscription I persume?) or how much this service is going to cost me. I'd rather not have to sign up to acquire this information. If this service is free, please state it clearly on the sign up page and tell me what your business model is. If on the contrary it is not, tell me what you plan to charge me before I sign up.

Thanks for the feedback. We normally charge subscription but we took off the pay wall this week for promo reasons.

What a great idea & execution.

As a programmer, I manage my resume on my github pages where can bring many benefits. - eg. make a new branch for a new company, easily add/remove related projects, install google analytics for checking who is interested in me, and so on.

Recently I've needed to submit my resume to several companies. What I surprised is that they, HR people, wanted only pdf/doc formatted resume even they work for software companies. What a silly.

VisualCV can be a proper solution between a old-fashined pdf resume file and too much opened LinkedIn page.

I'm curious - why branch for new companies? Your resume represents the linear flow of time, it's not like we get to try out alternate versions of ourselves :)

I'm from South Korea.

To apply for a Korean company, they usually require a formal photo, SSN, parents' jobs, house income, written self introduction, etc. No kidding. And I have a few years military service experiences as a Korean army that might be not related with software engineering.

So for those reasons, I had to split branches to appeal myself to diverse companies properly. I don't want to make companies confused with unnecessary info.

Just duplicated the resume I've been passing around to people that was generated with Word (bad idea, I know)

A few issues I noticed:

* Line breaks are not kept in a few areas (contact information specifically, might effect other areas)

* Free design has a header showing where it was made; PDF has a footer. Is there some way to remove this?

Overall, I like it (excluding the two issues shown above). I keep meaning to redo my resume in LaTeX for a while, I'll probably do that still at some point.

I scrolled all the way to the bottom and tapped on the names I saw, but didn't find a link to an example CV. Seems like you should have a link to a demo CV?

Thanks, I was just about to add a quick comment with our link. Here are some samples: https://www.visualcv.com/cv-templates/best/resume-samples Also a list of our designs: https://www.visualcv.com/cv-templates

There are more resources and links at the footer

This example: https://www.visualcv.com/robcraig

Has UTF-8 encoding errors: http://i.imgur.com/H0ko8iT.png

Thanks, will look into it.

So who owns the resulting CV?

Are users free to export their data or have some third party service import it?

Or is it more of a roach motel?

The user owns it. One of the core philosophy for us is that we don't monetize user data (ie opening our database for recruiters to search through).

Right now the user can import through PDF / Linkedin and export to PDF. We'll add more export formats in the future, I think hrXML and json endpoints would be pretty cool

So how do you make money?

pretty neat, could I have multiple versions of my resume?

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