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.
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.
yes, I did follow the above pattern, but due to a small network and few known people, they were excited, and a few of them signed up as well today, and others are going to sign up too, but it looks like that Validation failed right on my face.
You know, sometimes close small network validation fails too.
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.
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.
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).
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 <ul> 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.
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.
That is very helpful feedback. I will optimise that in a couple of hours.
> It sounds kind of anachronistic,
Hmmmm interesting. I thought this was the perfect time for this, but you may be right based on the attention I have received for the product or maybe it's because of my noisy landing page.
TBH I mostly use LinkedIn for this kind of thing. I do have a resume for the odd occasion I need it but LI mostly suffices. It's hard for me to know whether it would gain traction outside of my demographic, and so I can only speak narrowly.
Agreed, all my network participants said the same thing: they prefer LinkedIn.
Their only reason for supporting something like this was that they bought a domain they liked, and now to have something on those domains without the stress of managing hosting and coding, they would use that, since their domain are sitting idle in their registrar.
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.
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.
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.
yes, I did follow the above pattern, but due to a small network and few known people, they were excited, and a few of them signed up as well today, and others are going to sign up too, but it looks like that Validation failed right on my face.
You know, sometimes close small network validation fails too.
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.
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.
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).
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!
very interesting, I will be looking into it and adding it.
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 <ul> 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.
I would disagree here, people would still stalk other colleagues' blog posts or resumes or their CVs.
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.
That is very helpful feedback. I will optimise that in a couple of hours.
> It sounds kind of anachronistic,
Hmmmm interesting. I thought this was the perfect time for this, but you may be right based on the attention I have received for the product or maybe it's because of my noisy landing page.
TBH I mostly use LinkedIn for this kind of thing. I do have a resume for the odd occasion I need it but LI mostly suffices. It's hard for me to know whether it would gain traction outside of my demographic, and so I can only speak narrowly.
Agreed, all my network participants said the same thing: they prefer LinkedIn.
Their only reason for supporting something like this was that they bought a domain they liked, and now to have something on those domains without the stress of managing hosting and coding, they would use that, since their domain are sitting idle in their registrar.
I have no idea if these people are having any success, but you may want to take a look at…
https://hello.cv/
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.
No, tools like this will just end up being vibe coded.
readCV got substantial tractions before shutting down. You should look into it.
if u have time and enjoy make your own personal site, its a lil plus