HACKER Q&A
📣 usercvapp

Is there any demand for Personal CV/Resume website?


Hey everyone!

Many people are looking for jobs and typically apply via a CV or a resume PDF file.

Do you guys think? Something that can put their CV/resume as a website with /blog, /now, a website builder would help them and would be in Demand?

I just built one at UserCV.com and thought this would just go wild, but it looks like no one even noticed it.

Now, before I go and add more features, themes, I would like to have an opinion, if something like that would ever be in Demand or should I just trash it and move on!


  👤 Jugurtha Accepted Answer ✓
Your question is "Is there any demand for Personal CV/Resume website?". The short answer is: There is demand for employment.

What problem are you actually trying to solve? If you were looking for a job, would writing a résumé be the biggest hurdle for you?

People write CVs to apply for jobs, and they apply for jobs to work, and they work to have an income which they use to go on about life.

Now, what we have here is selling soap to hungry people who are broke. A CV builder is like soap in a restaurant; it is important to wash your hands at a restaurant, but you don't go to a restaurant to wash your hands.

It can be a hook to do other things, like discover your customers, etc. but your would be users eventually come to you to get a job. How do you get them there? What are the sides of this market?

You have a distribution problem. Ideally, anyone who uses your CV builder gets employed. Which means they get hired. Which means there's an employer on the other side who received that CV. How do you plug in that process?

Maybe go upstream and do some fine targeting, maybe a choice of the point of market entry: start with people who are looking for their first job and who've never had a CV. You shouldn't wait for them to find you; they may not even be aware they need a CV. Maybe you can start with employment agencies where you live. Many countries have agencies where unemployed people register to get notified when a job matching their skills is available. Maybe going to high-schools or colleges and getting your users there, on the spot, helping them making a CV.

Maybe fine-tune where you plug in that value chain: the builder is just to get the data in order to make recommendations to jobs that match their skills that they weren't even aware existed.

Get to know who you're serving and what serving them is about.

This response is about the feasibility of this, not about its viability as a business or if it is worth your while.


👤 byoung2
You should talk to users...in this case users are not just the people who put their CV/resume on your site, but also the recruiters, hiring managers, and interview committees who will be looking at the CV/resume. Their applicant tracking systems expect a file to be uploaded, pasted, or entered manually so that they can run it through a scanner to match keywords or whatever. As an interviewer, I get the resume attached to calendar invites, so it needs to be uploaded for that to work.

So go talk to the users and ask them what they need to make their jobs easier. For applicants, maybe they need a way to submit a basic resume, and then for each job, they can paste a link to the job description, and you can have generative AI revise the resume to match the job being applied for, and then they can download the PDF and use it to apply to that job.


👤 tacostakohashi
Maybe... what I have cobbled together / used myself for years:

* an XML file with all of my contact information, job history, skills, etc.

* a template/build system that can build PDF / html / MS word versions from that.

* the build system understands "profiles" and builds custom variations of the content for every profile.

For example, maybe I am looking for jobs in a few different locations / industries, my XML has phone numbers/addresses for, say, USA and Australia and Singapore, and I have some "business" jobs I leave off if I'm apply for a pure development role, and some low-level skills I'd leave off for a team lead role, etc.

In my case, it's just XML + XSLT + wkhtmltopdf + Make which does the job, but someone could do a much nicer job.


👤 jeremy_k
In my mind, the question you're trying to answer is whether or not a standalone CV on a website is better than a LinkedIn profile. I'm not sure of the answer to that, but I would lean towards it isn't more valuable in a standalone fashion.

However, I added my CV to own personal website so that it can viewed by people online who come across my website through my blog posts. The intent being that if they enjoyed reading my content and wanted to learn a bit more about me, they wouldn't have to jump over to LinkedIn.


👤 csomar
At first, I thought this was about generating a resume, as in creating a resume for the user. There is a niche demand for that where you can charge, maybe, $5 one time fee to create a user resume.

There is no demand for "resume website". There is demand for jobs/employment. Your website doesn't offer that and if it were, things kind of function differently (employees apply for the jobs; aka a job board).


👤 deverman
I like the idea of the /now page but I wouldn't assume all your customers know Derek Sivers or want the extra work.

For the resume I'm not looking to publish publicly my resume, I just want to publish enough that it gets someone to contact me for my full resume.

I have noticed this open format for resumes which I quite like and maybe there is something you can do with it:

https://jsonresume.org

Good luck!


👤 msgodel
I actually write my resume in html and just use Firefox to make a PDF out of it so I just scp to /var/www/html since that's practically free.

It's easy to just jump in and another

    tag when I learn something or switch companies. I don't like spending a ton of time on it since no one else seems to read it anyway.

👤 collinvandyck76
It sounds kind of anachronistic, although I think there might be some markets for that outside of this bubble. If you're looking for critique, I think your landing page is extremely noisy for such a simple idea. You'd probably get better traction with a more focused design.

👤 scarface_74
Why?

Who would ever see my resume on your site? Either a recruiter is going to reach out to me and ask me to send my resume to them directly or submit it to their ATS.

Anyone who finds me organically is going to be through LinkedIn.


👤 dotcoma
I have no idea if these people are having any success, but you may want to take a look at…

https://hello.cv/


👤 muzani
No, tools like this will just end up being vibe coded.

👤 sandra_vu
readCV got substantial tractions before shutting down. You should look into it.

👤 maxcomperatore
if u have time and enjoy make your own personal site, its a lil plus