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

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/yc-funded-jobspice-makes-resumes-web-friendly-with-a-facebook-co-founder-at-the-helm/

by suhail • 17 years ago

81 59 17 years ago

techcrunch.com

abossy• 17 years ago

Dane and Andrew: Congrats on launching!

JimEngland• 17 years ago

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

leif3• 17 years ago

ass-kickingly delicious

way to go fellas

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

conorgil1454• 17 years ago

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?

leif3• 17 years ago

you register when you're ready to save your résumé

leif3• 17 years ago

(this means click the floppy disk)

zackattack4• 17 years ago

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 :)

conorgil1454• 17 years ago

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.

babyshake• 17 years ago

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

mattmaroon• 17 years ago

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.

markm• 17 years ago

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.

adityakothadiya• 17 years ago

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.

Ras_• 17 years ago

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...

TrevorJ• 17 years ago

Well done. I like this a lot.

modoc2• 17 years ago

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.

amccollum5• 17 years ago

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.

zck3• 17 years ago

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.

dshah2• 17 years ago

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.

Tichy2• 17 years ago

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).

mhartl• 17 years ago

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

zackattack4• 17 years ago

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

Tichy2• 17 years ago

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?

jmintz• 17 years ago

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.

csmajorfive• 17 years ago

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

planck• 17 years ago

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

amccollum5• 17 years ago

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.

cwilson• 17 years ago

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

nopassrecover2• 17 years ago

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?

amccollum5• 17 years ago

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

nopassrecover2• 17 years ago

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

GrandMasterBirt• 17 years ago

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.

smokinn• 17 years ago

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.

prpon• 17 years ago

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.

herf• 17 years ago

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.

zck3• 17 years 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.

makmanalp• 17 years ago

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

happymonkey00• 17 years ago

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

noaharc• 17 years ago

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!

zackattack4• 17 years ago

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?

dshah2• 17 years ago

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.

jessor• 17 years ago

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

zaph0d• 17 years ago

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

sh1mmer• 17 years ago

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.

suhail• 17 years ago

God forbid they make it easy =)

zck3• 17 years ago

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

c00p3r• 17 years ago

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.

I_got_fifty• 17 years ago

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

conorgil1454• 17 years ago

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".

brown9-22• 17 years ago

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...".

mshafrir• 17 years ago

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

imdane• 17 years ago

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

conorgil1454• 17 years ago

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

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

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