Ask HN: Review my startup - Praux.com, The Last Resume You'll Ever Write

by mikeyg • 16 years ago

17 32 16 years ago

I'm still looking through the site, but right off the bat, I'd say I'm not sure about the name. What does it mean? It's pronounced "Pro", but it reminds me of "faux", which is probably not what you want. Just wondering where the name came from and if I'm missing something clever.

marketer• 16 years ago

Yeah, the moment I saw "Prauxmote yourself", i closed the window. I don't know if it's supposed to be cute or clever, but it made me feel uneasy.

mos1• 16 years ago

I didn't close my window... but the only reason I didn't was that I was intending to provide a review for an HN'er, as a service.

I vomited a little in my mouth though, as I despise invented marketspeak words.

Also, I'm not on a particularly fast connection at the moment, but your graphical widget (I assume it was flash) took a few seconds to show up for me. I had probably 2-3 seconds where I was being told to Prauxmote myself, by PC... and that was it.

I definitely would've hit the back button in any other circumstance.

anigbrowl• 16 years ago

Like the animated presentation, except for the speech bubbles. Link to 'about' page should be more prominent, I want that info before signing up. Also, more screenshots or a demo. I don't like registering first - let me play with it, then register when I have something I want to save (eg >250 words input).

The idea is very neat: I like your non-ownership approach. I think you need to show more to potential employers in terms of tools to help navigate all these very individualized resumes.

Sorry, I share Ryan's misgivings about the name. Try again.

yannis• 16 years ago

Your application left me with a number of questions:

(01) Are you aiming for people to upload CV's or for Companies to use the application to find candidates.

(02) As a candidate I would like to see how these CV's should look. (You should provide some pages with samples - before registration).

(03) Are you going to charge me?

Any application should have a prominent CALL FOR ACTION button. What must I do to upload my CV? Can I do this without registering please? After all I am bound to give you my email on the CV and you can ask me for a password at that point and do I really need to go through a captcha?

Please don't take the above as negative, disrupt the market by all means if you can, but I feel the interface needs a bit of work, it also needs to be a more serious which I believe the flash block on the front page does project a very light image. Would a financial manager applicant feel comfortable to give that link to a Bank CEO?

In my view is that you need at least two more iterations. The first one should include a more careful look at the market segment you are targeting and the second one to amend the UI to 'funnel' your visitors to immediate action.

Bonus would be to be able to alley privacy concerns and to offer a degree verification program.

What does P.C. stand for?

nfnaaron2• 16 years ago

"What does P.C. stand for?"

Looks like Praux.Com to me.

Tawheed• 16 years ago

Don't waste time with slideshows, just put up a video and explain what it is your product does and why I care!

erikwiffin• 16 years ago

I'm at work, with no sound. Don't really want to watch videos anyways.

In short, I loved the slideshows, and want to see more of them.

robotron2• 16 years ago

Agreed, I think it looks nice and catchy. It might need some design work I'm not qualified to comment on.

obsaysditto• 16 years ago

When I go to your site, my first reaction is "so whats the next step?". Maybe give a flow chart showing the transformation of a resume/cv.

ashishbharthi• 16 years ago

absolutely. 1. You need something saying that "Get Started" 2. You need to let people know that if its free or what is the chage. 3. Demo/Sample resume. 4. Facility to email resume/link with cover letter. 5. May be advantages of using your service over word document/google documents

mikeyg3• 16 years ago

Thank you very much for all of your feedback so far! Very thoughtful and appreciated!

robotron2• 16 years ago

Interesting service and I agree with most of what's been said here. I have to reiterate the naming choice - it really does make me think of "faux", which would in turn cause me to hesitate passing out the URL to show my resume.

tyrelb3• 16 years ago

agreed. took me a while to figure out how to pronounce it, then figure out what it meant...

aw3c2• 16 years ago

Your site is almost blank if the visitor has Javascript disabled. There is a huge blank space even if it is enabled, I guess a Flash thing? Just add some noscript elements and alt/text stuff. That would be good for crawler bots too I guess.

drewdrewdrew• 16 years ago

+1 on the name...I say lose the stats and have either screenshots or an intuitive demo.

savrajsingh• 16 years ago

check out hitbio.com

tyrelb3• 16 years ago

checked it out: but serving difference markets. hitbio is a google search (Basically tells you type your name).

praux-whever is about sharing resumes, critiquing, etc.

nysauhem• 16 years ago

I'm playing around with the resume editing, which is pretty clean so far. I am wondering what the difference is between "project descriptions", "course or training information", and "job and project experience". It seems like you could combine the three and make the interface simpler.

tyrelb3• 16 years ago

privacy issue - i wouldn't want anyone knowing all my personal details. especially to the public.

maybe a hide / block feature. but then this would just become another .docx/.pdf resume site.

i like the idea of being able to share/critique. sometimes people are lost for words in their own resume and need help. eg: using action words when describing their role.

good work! keep it up!

semanticist• 16 years ago

Does it spit out a Word document at the end? If not, it's not useful for people who expect to hand data to recruitment companies.

I work for a company that provides CV/Resume parsing services to recruitment companies, and they all want Word documents they can reformat to their house style (and usually anonymise so the employer can't contact the candidate directly) using automated software (either ours or their CRM provider's).

Are you taking structured data from people to generate the resume? Have you considered generating HR-XML which can be passed straight to various CRMs and HR tools?

Do you provide an API to allow multi-board search tools (which we also produce) to search the resumes on your service? Recruitment companies don't want to search your site individually - they want to search everywhere at once.

You're just getting started, but trac's really not a good choice for managing your end-user help! Save it for your developer documentation and get something nicer in there, quickly!

mikeyg3• 16 years ago

It does spit out a word document at the end (if you want one).. The URLs are RESTful. To get a document file out of a resume go to the resume / view you want then do filename.ext.. so http://michael.gregorowicz.praux.com/resume.doc would give you a word document. .txt, text file.. .odt, .pdf, etc!

tptacek• 16 years ago

Are the "top resumes" intended to help sell the site? Because they don't. 3 of them still have boilerplate in them, one of them is like 7 pages of ill-formated random technical qualifications, and none of them contain anything that shows off the value of the service. Axe that from the front page.

I don't know about the job market for people from Joann's Fabric, but the little cartoon guy is the wrong tone for my market.

I feel like LinkedIn solves the problem that this site is trying to solve.

petervandijck• 16 years ago

- you're competing with LinkedIn, you know that?

- The images (the little guy) and some of the wording is too dorky. Not saying you shouldn't show personality, but this is the wrong personality.

- "Theme your resume using CSS" - if you're aiming at regular people, forget this geeky stuff.

- I'm not clear on why I would put my resume there? I have LinkedIn set up, just seems better ("better" in this case means I'll get more professional benefit/job offers).

mattwdelong• 16 years ago

A few suggestions, and an idea.

Unlike many people here, I do like the name. I understood it immediately, and contrary to what people are saying about "buzzwords", when writing a resume you are in fact promoting yourself. If I did have a suggestion, maybe add Resume to the name? PrauxResume.com ?

You lack a call to action. I really don't know what the next step on the website is. You need to explain precisely what I need to do next. Most of your users will be fairly stupid, they need to be told!

Someone mentioned the comment bubbles in your slideshow. I also agree that they need to go, they distract me from the useful content I am supposed to be reading. The comments are cute and clever and all, but get rid of them.

Finally, I think this would be fairly useful for people looking to hire people. Perhaps you could add some useful tools for people to search for resumes based on experience and geographical location - be sure to include protection so that peoples content can't be harvested for malicious purposes. Perhaps even an opt-out of the search, which is probably an essential addition.

I like it and have added it to my bookmarks, I may use it down the road. Best of luck and hope you get all the feedback you can handle.

jonas_b• 16 years ago

Hello guys. As someone who's supposed to graduate this summer I can really see the value of this thing. I think you have done a terrific job.

There are some points for improvement though. As is already mentioned, I think the faster you let people experience the ease of creating the resumes the better.

qjz• 16 years ago

Since you're already creating subdomains for users, you might want to consider adding wildcard DNS beneath those domains so you can take advantage of the DNS prefetching that is all the rage in browsers and email clients these days. For example, say I obtain qjz.praux.com on your site. If I send a link to my resume to someone at IBM using ibm.qjz.praux.com, DNS prefetching might trigger a lookup. If you monitor this and make the reports available to me for my subdomain, I'll know that someone has at least read my email. If they click on the link and you make the web stats available to me for my subdomain, I'll know that someone visited my resume online (you'll need to do some virtual host wildcarding on your web server). The wildcard DNS allows me to create ad hoc subdomains for all my tracking needs.

mikeyg3• 16 years ago

You can already do this, but with subwebs instead of subdomains.. e.g. qjz.praux.com/ibm/ .. Simply tag the content into the "ibm" view and it will show up at /ibm/ .. ibm.qjz.praux.com is a completely separate resume-eligible host name.. that someone else could use for their own resume.

nfnaaron2• 16 years ago

(I'm not educated in UI, UX or UXB, these are just my impressions, written with friendly intent)

Title:

The title bar says "Praux - Welcome To Praux.com"

You're missing an opportunity to tell readers and google what you do.

Maybe instead "Praux - Your resume, your way" or something like that.

Front page:

There is no stable description of what the site does, above the fold. When I first looked at the front page (on an 800px high laptop screen), I saw:

  - P.C
  - login and signup widgets
  - a cute phrase
  - the top two thirds of a flash block

The only thing above the fold that tells me what you do is the flash block. But I only got through two or three words of the first cartoon I saw before it transitioned to the next one. "Wait, what?" It felt a little like getting hit in the forehead with a spitball; disorienting. And I still couldn't figure out what you do until I scrolled down a bit to see the whole flash block.

I would put a stable blurb of text, near the top (you could shove that login/signup stuff up and to the right to free up some room) that says what you do in a nutshell.

The word "resume" does not appear anywhere on the front page until below the flash block, except within the flash block itself (see below).

The Flash Block:

Lots of your target users probably block flash. Do you want to rely on flash to present your first impression to these kinds of people?

The word "resume" or even the idea of a resume does not appear until the third slide.

  - 1st slide: "your content" I have a lot of that. Which?
  - 2nd slide: "community" To do what? Critique my content.
  - 3rd slide: We have resume! But the dudes pop up and cover them.
  - 4th slide: not bad
  - 5th slide: almost not bad

I think the dudes in the cartoon are unnecessary.

The flash block slides go too fast for me to think about one slide before the next one comes up. Yes, I can read them, and by now I know the site has something to do with resumes, but now I want to digest what you can do for me. I feel like I'm being rushed through a presentation, like you don't care whether I get it or not, you just want to get through the presentation. (I realize you do care, this is about how I'm reacting.)

Below the fold:

I like the graphs, they lend credibility and interest to the site.

Footer:

"I thought about this page for: 0.04645 seconds"

That gave me a chuckle, but if you must have this data, I'd change it to be more sober. But really: who cares? Only you, and other random web developers.

"3.11.31"

What's that?

Master List and Search Resumes are on the bottom line with the rest of the administrivia, but these are Features. They both need to be more prominent, and Search Resumes should be top right of the page where everyone else puts their search widget.

Help should also be more prominent, probably right up there with Search at the top, or maybe in its present location but with a bigger font size.

The Help youtube video:

The music adds nothing to the presentation, and at six minutes of trying to follow a tiny cursor around a tiny screen of tiny text fields, I'm not going to make it distracted by the music.

Maybe it's just me, but I really, really tire of faux dramatic music played over something that is not at all dramatic. E.g. when the music first crescendos, someone is typing "Objective ..." in a text field. Ooh! Ahh!

You could improve this video immensely by making it silent.

(Actually, it's cool music, just not here.)

And why is there a Russian (I guess) word at the end of the video?

The video is way too small for me to follow, even when I broke it out of the page. Maybe I don't have the right youtube skills.

About Page:

Top paragraph is not bad, but the very first thing you should say is "Praux does this and this and that for you." Probably in its own one-sentence paragraph, right at the top.

"... we want everyone to know that YOU are the owner of your identity, not us. Not Facespace, Swamptroll, or MixedIn. YOU. Sure, you can link to YOUR content hosted here from any of those sites and many others, and we encourage these sites to integrate with us ..."

If you're calling your potential collaborators "Swamptroll" I don't think they're going to be all that interested in collaborating. In general this is a mildly belligerent paragraph, which I also think would discourage collaboration.

Possible re-write:

"... we want everyone to know that YOU are the owner of your identity, not us. You can link to your content hosted here from any other social site, and we encourage those sites to integrate with us ..."

"Let's face it.. it's tough out there right now. We need to remember, we're all in this together."

The two dots should be three dots, with one space on both ends, which makes them an ellipsis (although I'm not sure if this is the correct way to use an ellipsis; maybe an M-dash?). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis

However, a little wordy, you could probably cut these two sentences.

Search Resumes:

Does Search work? I searched for variations of Alison Kroulek and got no results, but she's the first one in the Master List.

jdietrich• 16 years ago

I understand that your product is a resume tool of some sort, but a) you demand that I hand over my personal information before showing me anything of the tool and b) you don't give me any compelling reason to sign up. No sale.

dustingetz• 16 years ago

how are you going to make money?

jawn• 16 years ago

I like this app. I was recently looking for a place to host a resume, and wish I had come across your site sooner.

As everyone else has already said, your messaging and initial pitch need to be cleaned up. Personally, I would stress the sub-resume's idea as that seems to be your best feature.

I'd also add an option to incorporate facebook/linkedin/twitter profiles to a resume. I did see the share buttons, but having a direct link to the persons profile would be a good feature as well.

Best of luck.

Ask HN: Review my startup - Praux.com, The Last Resume You'll Ever Write

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