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Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles
- _andychung 6y agoI started read.cv when transitioning from full time to freelance design in July. I wanted an easy to update 'about me' page to link from my website and bio – something simpler than LinkedIn and more dynamic than a PDF. Design wise I focused on legibility and tried to give projects/side projects equal weight to things like education and work experience. A few unique features: tagging collaborators in your experiences, status updates, and print optimized profiles. It took me around three months (Sept to November) to get it out the door, and I've been working on making improvements since. Open to any questions or feedback!
- neom 6y agoHey Andy, I never received the verification email. je at h4x.club
- MattGaiser 6y agoCheck your junk. That is where mine ended up.
- neom 6y agoHa, thanks. Went past spam and straight to trash for some reason. First time I've seen that from a signup.
- _andychung 6y agoWelp, sorry about that. Wonder if the .cv tld makes has anything to do with this...
- MattGaiser 6y agoWhat are you using for your email backend?
- _andychung 6y agoThe authentication emails are sent by Firebase.
- deftnerd 6y agoIf this does grow, it might be worth getting another domain just for email purposes such as "read-cv-email.com".
- potiuper 6y agoHow was the experience with setting up a Cape Verde business entity for the domain? Any issues or regrets?
- adambyrtek 6y agoI guess you simply purchase the domain. Just like bit.ly which, as far as I know, doesn't have an entity in Libya.
- fakedang 6y agoDifferent domain locations have different rules. For example, if you want to get a .sg domain, you need a Singapore entity. If you want a .aero domain, you need to show you're an aerospace business to the registrar.
- _andychung 6y agoI tried doing it through 101domain.com and couldn't because I didn't have a registered business in Cape Verde. I tried again using Marcaria.com and they handled the registration process and I haven't had any issues so far.
- michaeljohansen 6y agoAre you sure about that? Appears to me that you need a registered trademark in Cape Verde, which Marcaria also has a process for (costs a lot and takes up to a year). I'm fairly certain your domain will expire within three months after purchase without a valid trademark certificate.
- russomi 6y agoWell done. I'm going to use it.
- rodolphoarruda 6y agoHey Andy, good job! The app looks really clean and nice to navigate through. I just wanted to share a couple of "views" that I created to express my career in a different way. I'm sharing just for your inspiration. (content in Portuguese, but I bet you can auto translate it) Experience view; years of experience per theme/subject. https://rodolphoarruda.pro.br/experiencia/ https://rodolphoarruda.pro.br/experiencia/ Projects & cultural context in chronological order (notice the flags) https://rodolphoarruda.pro.br/eu/lista-de-projetos/ https://rodolphoarruda.pro.br/eu/lista-de-projetos/ I decided to make those views available because I stopped believing the standard CV/LinkedIn format for presenting myself and my career. Cheers and keep up the great work!
- _andychung 6y agoCool this is super helpful, thank you!
- glenstein 6y agoI just want to say this is a fantastic idea, and as another commenter said, it would be great to eat linkedin's lunch. My only feedback I guess would be to make same wish I make about just about any project these days, which is compatibility with activitypub. Do you have thoughts on the promise of a project like this to work on that kind of protocol?
- gilli 6y ago> Design wise I focused on legibility and tried to give projects/side projects equal weight to things like education and work experience. A few unique features: tagging collaborators in your experiences, status updates, and print optimized profiles. I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I think your definition of legibility is maybe a bit off, the font is too small to be considered legible by any accessibility standard. I have 20/20 vision but I struggle to read some of it. The color contrast is also failing in some cases, and since the font is so small and thin, the contrast needs to be increased above what color contrast would suggest. Also, when I wanted to check the size of the font (which is set at 14px but that seems equivalent to 11-12px for the common fonts like Arial) I realized I can't actually select any of the text, which I think might be important a website like this. You are creating some mask with a different div that might be blocking the clicks. You can create a mask like that with simpler html and css that won't have a problem with clicks. Otherwise it's a nice project and it looks like you got a good traction already. I hope this helps.
- gilli 6y agoRight, so I read a bit further and saw a comment about the view example button, which took me to the proper cv. So my comment isn't completely accurate, haha.
- mgalgs 6y agoLove it. I see you're not running ads. What's your plan for monetization?
- earthscienceman 6y agoI would love to be able to embed the CV into a personal page so that it could link to the full profile on your site. I could picture it being the perfect link between a social network and private content.
- ryandrake 6y ago1. As others have pointed out, the default font size is way, way too small. Not readable on a phone, barely on a computer monitor. 2. Please try your site on an oldish iPhone, like an iPhone 7, in landscape mode. You give about 2cm of space for the scrolling content. The problem seems to be keeping the "View example" button anchored on the bottom of the screen at all times, with a large fixed border around the button. This leaves no room for the actual content. When you actually click "View example," the resulting page renders fine on a landscape iPhone. 3. Please try your site on a large 27" monitor in full screen mode. Your content's width is a fixed number of pixels and you end up rendered on a tiny sliver (about 1/5) centered horizontally on the screen. Please don't be one of those sites that has huge horizontal whitespace margins (I'm looking at you, John Gruber). It's a terrible web trope. Consider using the whole width of the browser window, or most of it. 4. I also agree that headshot photos should not be part of this product. Dare to be actually different from LinkedIn. Please post here again after some iteration, this thing has promise.
- mvind 6y agoHey looks great! What stack have you used? In particularly how did you develop such clean UI?
- aabbcc1241 6y agoLooks not bad on mobile phone but the font size can be made bigger.
- _andychung 6y agoFor sure, have heard this a few times now.
- ColinWright 6y agoSome feedback from a random internet person, take it with a fistful of salt. Why are there non-functioning arrows next to the names of projects, companies, etc.? Why does it keep randomly re-rendering while I'm trying to read something? The design is, no doubt to some people, gorgeous, but I'm finding the landing page example completely unusable. If it's intended to show off capability then it needs to be clear that that's the purpose. If it's intended to be usable then it needs to be re-thought. (Later) Ah, when I go to an actual example then the arrow isn't functional, but the text on which the arrow is placed, is a link. My reaction ... I don't want it to be discoverable, requiring exploration to work out the functionality. I want it to be immediately obvious, using existing internet norms. If I visit for the purpose of looking at a CV I don't want to have to learn how to use the site, I want to get the information I'm looking for.
- _andychung 6y agoThanks for the feedback! As you mentioned the arrows indicate that the project is an outbound link (links are optional so having a visual indication that something is linked was necessary, though there are certainly other ways this could be achieved). Pages subscribe to updates in real time, so I think you just so happened to be viewing a profile as it was being edited. Seems like live updates should probably only be on for the editor. As for the landing page I'm hoping to redo this in general. As a quick first version I just embedded an actual profile so I wouldn't have to update image assets as the design changed, but I can see how this approach is confusing.
- swamy_g 6y ago(unsolicited) Feedback: Why are there other people on my CV? Who are they to begin with? And when a recruiter is looking at my CV, I don't want them clicking on other people.
- _andychung 6y agoThe idea is that you're able to (optionally) tag coworkers and collaborators in your work experience and projects. Although this doesn't track 1:1 with the traditional CV use case, it felt like a great way to celebrate the people you work with and create lightweight endorsements. If you choose to print or save your profile as a PDF these tags are hidden automatically, making it much more of a traditional CV, appropriate for job applications etc.
- SavannahJS 6y agoFirst off - cool project, nice work! Just riffing off some ideas for the 'coworkers and collaborators' section as well since I agree that I wouldn't find it useful as a sometimes-recruiter in its current state. I think the section could do with some more structure or information given. E.g. instead of just loose association with other folks who work at the same company, break associations into 'reports to', 'close teammates', 'manages' (or make that information visible on hover or something). There's probably a pretty cool hierarchical way to show this information but maybe people would find that too invasive. As someone who conducts interviews pretty often, understanding a person's team structure would definitely be useful, and would still serve the 'social proof' function you've described. The collaborator's title while they were involved with that specific project might also make it easier to parse what the working relationship was between the CV owner and the collaborator as well.
- JoshTriplett 6y agoIt isn't any form of "endorsement" if you can add them without confirmation from the person you're tagging.
- tmhrtly 6y ago
- andygcook 6y agoCongrats on the launch. Overall it's really clean and I like the design. Some quick feedback, which you can take with a grain of salt: * I was confused by the image CV on the homepage. It expected it to be clickable, and it took me a minute to find the View Demo button. * I love the collaborators feature. IMO this is one the biggest missing factors of LinkedIn (e.g. who did you actually work with on a small team) * It would be nice to be able to customize the invite message when inviting a collaborator. * The Create a Profile button on the homepage doesn't user cursor: pointer, which made me miss that it was the sign up button at first glance. * It looks like most of the links don't have cursor: pointer, which feels off to me * Once I saved my profile, it took me a minute to find the edit button in the bottom left Overall, nice working and I'm looking forward to following the updates. Also, great first name you have there.
- _andychung 6y agoThank you fellow Andy — Hear you about the homepage, hoping to completely redo it soon and create more abstracted visuals. In terms of the pointer, my current logic is to use cursor: pointer on anything that visually looks like a link (e.g. unstyled text), and to leave it as default for components that have a visual affordance that they are clickable (e.g. buttons or tabs). I realize this might not be the most web-like convention though - might be worth it to just move all clickable components to the pointer cursor.
- NikolaNovak 6y agoYes please; personally, I've had couple of decades of training and habits that a change in cursor indicates clickability; without my cursor changing, it feels like a static image, not interactive page. Otherwise, awesome sauce :)
- bagels 6y agoNo cursor on mobile, so it's not enough.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
- orky56 6y agoGreat idea and execution! I personally find the white space excessive and it's made more obvious on print. Unless someone is name dropping companies, I would expect a resume to have a lot more information in a higher density view. A cool idea would be to replace the facepile with various icons with numbers next to it to show quantified metrics that were accomplishments of various positions/projects ($X rev/# commits/# users/etc.)
- ttamslam 6y agoApologies for being off topic, but the side project you link - https://andychung.me/self-portrait https://andychung.me/self-portrait - is absolutely awesome. Runs like butter in the browser and I absolutely love the art style. Kudos to you!
- _andychung 6y agoWow thank you! It was definitely a fun project.
- I_am_tiberius 6y agoYes it's great. But why does he wear slippers outside?
- mav3rick 6y agoThose aren't slippers. Those are birkenstocks!
- _andychung 6y agoHaha yup
- cjjuice 6y agowith socks?!
- 6y ago
- edoceo 6y agoI can't swipe or otherwise close the left menu once it's open (Android/pixel3/chrome) Remember resume.json spec that was on here a few years ago? Any plans to support that?
- _andychung 6y agoI haven't implemented gestures to open the sidebar yet unfortunately - currently to close the sidebar on mobile either tap the right edge of the screen (the sliver of the detail), or tap a navigation item in the sidebar.
- marcinzm 6y agoMy feedback is that the collaborators aren't very useful to me. As in, I get 10+ tiny unrecognizable face icons and a name if I hover over them. There's no way to a see a list of collaborators and their one sentence blurbs for a specific project. Not even sure if shared collaborators are highlighted if you're logged in yourself or not.
- _andychung 6y agoI'm thinking of simply truncating collaborators after a certain number and offering the ability to open the full list in a modal or something.
- whiddershins 6y agoI would like it if the collaborators were in a cluster on the right of the Company name, rather than inline. It would make it more clear that this is a related concept. As you eyes go down the left side of the page you would read contiguous CV info, supporting information would be a little more segregated to the right.
- css 6y agoI have been using represent.io for this purpose; nice to see some competition in this space.
- jgurewitz 6y agoI really dig this. Well done. I like the collaborator feature. One piece of feedback, I almost missed the contact information at the bottom of the profile. Any chance of having a preferred contact at the top so it's harder to miss?
- _andychung 6y agoYou can rearrange the order of the sections using the grab handles in the editor. Let me know if that helps!
- jgurewitz 6y agoIt does! I guess I was hoping for kind of a more prominent option instead of another section, but that's a nitpick. Nice work again!
- alexjray 6y agoThings I like. - projects and feature section. - Simple clean design, easy to edit - printable Things I don't like - Super buggy - no support for company lookup/reference (need to build company DB and connect the social graphs, this is why Linkedin is so valuable/has a moat i.e. your biggest challenge.) - No ability to add a custom section to my profile. - I would like to add things non-work related like music i'm listening to, books I'm reading etc... - The above makes things more personal, but I would go even further the more intimate the better IMO. Work is personal.
- _andychung 6y agoHave definitely been thinking about how to make sections more customizable as I'll never be able to make the defaults cover every use case. What bugs are you encountering?
- eyelidlessness 6y agoThis is visually very attractive. Have you considered supporting uploading structured resume formats like FRESH? Edit: also I want to emphasize the fact that this looks great on mobile, which isn’t something I always expect in this space. That said I’d consider bumping up the text size a bit (or allowing users to do so for their own profile).
- vaillant 6y agoI was wondering about the existence of structured resume formats, so thank you for this random piece of knowledge in a place I did not expect to find it.
- myself248 6y agoFor real. I've been wishing for such a format for years. Now if I find myself applying for jobs, I can sneer derisively at places that don't support any of these, and then grudgingly apply for them manually anyway.
- olegp 6y agoWould you be able to provide a link to the FRESH format you mention? What other structured resume formats are there in widespread use?
- photonios 6y agoIn Europe, EUROPASS is not uncommon: https://europa.eu/europass/en/create-europass-cv https://europa.eu/europass/en/create-europass-cv
- BossingAround 6y agoIn Europe, you'll never impress anyone with Europass, but you're highly unlikely not screw anything up. It is well structured, people know what to expect, it's machine readable... Personally, I like it a lot, as opposed to some flashy website PDF that an applicant thinks it's amazing, but it takes me extra 30s to find a piece of data on it.
- Exuma 6y agotext way too small and hard to read, by like an order of magnitude
- twobitshifter 6y agoThere are 27 photos at the bottom on mobile? Who are these people? If these are example profiles I would try to get a more diverse and inclusive grouping. There is not a woman in the 27 and ideally it would be 50/50
- _andychung 6y agoThese are simply the most recent users who have signed up, and unfortunately the the HN demographic is pretty male...
- camdenlock 6y ago“Unfortunately”. What a ridiculous culture we’ve built if this sentiment is widely accepted. Just bizarre.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ska 6y agoNothing bizarre about it; Diverse viewpoints tend to strengthen a community, so considering it unfortunate that HN doesn't benefit from a broader demographic distribution is pretty defensible.
- camdenlock 6y agoBy that logic, it would be sensible to lament that, say, a particular daycare is staffed entirely by women, or that a particular ice hockey team is made up entirely of white men. Sometimes groups of humans coalesce these ways, and there’s nothing wrong or unfortunate about it. No intervention requested or required. If you want to champion diversity of viewpoints, that’s a different matter entirely, and such conditions may be desirable, depending on the wants & needs of the group in question. Take these things on a case-by-case basis. Don’t reach for top-down governance as a panacea when such a thing is neither requested nor required.
- Animats 6y agoI saw the world "mindful", and groaned.
- camdenlock 6y agoAlso saw the addition of the pronouns section and cringed. I hope such expressions of religious affiliation are optional.
- sebdufbeau 6y agoThey are optional, but I'm not sure what pronouns have to do with religion.
- camdenlock 6y agoThe concept of personal pronoun assignments is part of a very specific orthodoxy.
- asimjalis 6y agoNice work. Quick feedback. Instead of (or in addition to) using Google to authenticate could you use LinkedIn? That way the site could pull my information from LinkedIn instead of making me enter it again.
- _andychung 6y agoThanks! I think pulling information from LinkedIn would be awesome and really reduce friction to creating an account.
- danaliv 6y agoThis is awesome! I’d recommend adding a section for certifications. I have a bunch of FAA certs that are career-relevant but they don’t fit naturally into any of the existing profile sections. I’d also suggest making some of the fields wider. 24 characters for location isn’t going to be long enough, for example.
- _andychung 6y agoGreat feedback - some other sections that have been requested are patents, teaching, and languages. Will likely be adding these soon.
- lanewinfield 6y agoAgreed. And I can't fit my professional title within the character limit either. But that's probably more of a sign of a personal/professional problem than a bug... :)
- danaliv 6y agoMy longest official title was 56 characters, and my second-longest was 52. Absurd!
- 42droids 6y agoIt’s pretty awesome. Great job. I have been working on a similar project aimed at content creators - they also need their LinkedIn. The idea is that you can build your Authentic Profile by connecting your social APIs. It’s called Authentic https://authenticstats.com https://authenticstats.com and it’s growing fast. :) Good luck with your project.
- maltris 6y agoLike it, cool feature would be: Some kind of passphrase-protection or option to make the profile private.
- _andychung 6y agoFor sure, have heard this feedback before especially from people who would like to hide their profile from their current employer.
- molloy 6y agoVery nice! So, in Safari on iOS 14, the view demo link brought me to a page that was mostly blank besides the name and picture. I turned on a screen recording to capture the bug, but then was unable to reproduce it (started the recording on this page and followed the link again.) I should have thought to screenshot the page before doing so, oh well! Maybe it was due to a failed XHR request for the profile data, if the pages are being rendered client-side.
- _andychung 6y agoThanks! Ah yeah, sounds like it could have been a weird connection and failed to load the rest of the page.
- maltris 6y agoLike it. A nice feature would be: Some kind of password-protection or private mode.
- gwbas1c 6y agoMaybe try some screenshots that imply the target use cases? IE: Why would I use this when I have a profile on LinkedIn? Why would I use this when I could just put a resume up on my website?
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y agoVs. LinkedIn: I started using it in 2009, but it's become virtually unusable for me. The only reason I haven't deleted my account is it has up to date contact information for my 1,300 LinkedIn connections.
- JamesAdir 6y agoLooks great! Could you share details about your stack? Would live to learn more about it.
- krmmalik 6y agoThis seems very useful, but one question I have is how suitable is this for freelancers? Not everyone is looking for a full-time Job or wants to present a CV as such but still wants to showcase their work and what they've achieved but your site seems a little more Cv oriented? I hope it makes sense what I'm getting at?
- _andychung 6y agoFor sure get what you mean. I actually wanted to give equal weight to things like projects and side projects for this very reason (instead of purely work experience and education). I'm hoping this can be seen a little bit less like a formal CV, and sort of a easy to share link you can throw in your bio or even use as a personal website.
- krmmalik 6y agoYes. I'm interested in the personal website aspect.
- h327 6y agoThe design is really elegant! I could see myself using this if I could make my CV unlisted / un-indexed. I used to have a public resume, but then recruiters found it and relentlessly spammed me with irrelevant recruiting offers, and also spread my resume to more and more recruiting spam networks. I also wonder if you have a plan for monetization; I didn't see a FAQ about content rights / usage / pricing.
- _andychung 6y agoDefinitely heard the private account feedback - and recruiter spam is a big reason why I didn't want to include any kind of comments of DMs for a first version. Will be looking into how to better support this. In terms of monetization I plan on keeping the profile aspect free to use. If the user base gets big enough to warrant it I could see charging businesses to create job listings on a jobs section or something.
- rileyt 6y agoCheck out https://standardresume.co https://standardresume.co. It has web resumes/profiles that allow you to set noindex. Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders and it isn't completely free, although it sounds like you might appreciate that :).
- vaillant 6y agoVery cool, and great use of the read.cv domain name.
- 6510 6y agothe Side Projects links here don't work https://read.cv/about https://read.cv/about
- saos 6y agoClean and simple!
- eplanit 6y agoI stumbled at "Mindful", and then stopped fully at "He/him".
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- camdenlock 6y agoYeah, what does “mindful” mean in this context exactly? Is it some kind of signal indicating adherence to a certain orthodoxy?
- scottmcdot 6y agoI had to Google what "He/him" meant then stopped.
- pranade 6y agoLove the design -- pretty cool work!
- alanchen 6y agoWould be wonderful if the status can be synced with my Twitter account! Also would definitely pay for it I can use a custom domain.
- lordlarm 6y agoThis is awesome! As many others are sharing feedback, I thought I’d might add some myself: I would like to have better support for changing roles internally within the same company (ie promotions etc) and in this regard having the month available at least as an option would be great. LinkedIn uses the company as a higher level grouping, then the years/months spent in a certain position. For me to use this regularly I would have some reason to check in; and I guess either building up “company profiles” where I could see people who work in a certain company or indeed an interesting way to find companies and open positions would be great. I love the “features” section and the focus on adding people you’ve worked closely with. As you are - it seems - involved in Quip too, I’m cheeky enough to add some feedback in that product: fix notifications (!) - managing and keeping track of them is close to impossible, make it easier to actually discuss higher level on a particular document (not per line, and the comments in the sidebar disappears quickly) and lastly please add support for collapsing certain sections of a document :-)
- rotbart 6y agoOverall would recommend leveraging the schema from JSONResume (https://jsonresume.org/schema/ https://jsonresume.org/schema/) that supports all of the above
- _andychung 6y agoThanks for the great feedback! I definitely want to explore a company profiles product - will be interesting trying to make that feel rich enough with only a few companies on board at the beginning. As for Quip I left in July but I'll be sure to pass the feedback on!
- swyx 6y agosigned up immediately. looks beautiful. i LOVE that you have dark mode right out of the gate. what are your plans for this? is this a fun side project or a proto-startup?
- _andychung 6y agoThank you! It started as a side project but I have a few ideas on how to turn this into something a bit more real.
- udfalkso 6y agoVery cool! One thing I'd need to have if I continue to play with it is some toggle for public/draft. Right now it seems my profile is immediately public but I'm not sure I want to keep it yet, and it's still a WIP even if I do. Thanks!
- jariel 6y agoYou folks may want to reconsider having photos in CVs. Not only are people going to be very strongly biased by race, ethnicity etc., but also by the trivialities of presentation: dress, apparent attitude, choice of background. All of those things signal 'personal brand'. These things are becoming 'far too important' in terms of how we evaluate each other and this development is really lacking in self awareness for a generation of folks who are supposed to be against this kind of stuff. Secondarily, I'm wary that overall, this is just contributes to the 'life resume BS' competition of filling up your professional profile with rubbish to make you seem engaged - much like 'GitHub commits' as some kind of signal of validity. At least with LinkedIn it's considered to be 'professional' i.e. this is your 'work presentation' - the casual nature of these new CVs tries to blend some personal and aspiration aspects so as to make the individual seem more 'authentic'. This is a creeping cultural problem and might be the source of a lot of baseline social conflict in the office. It's a 'place of work' - your hobbies are nice, but not relevant.
- bmallerd 6y agoHello from Vancouver! Great work. One piece of feedback - would be great if there was an "import from Linkedin" feature. It seems like a lot of the information has already been populated, and it's annoying to c/p it over. Hit me up if you need some help.
- samirsd 6y agomy only gripe is that it takes too many clicks to change your profile photo, otherwise looks amazing!
- jshmrsn 6y agoUser feedback: I don’t know if read.cv will be around forever since it’s a new thing. I feel compelled to give it a shot since I’m attracted to the cleaner low-noise profiles compared to LinkedIn. I was scanning the marketing material to see if there was an option to export a CV as static HTML in case I wanted to self-host the CV. The closest thing was the bullet about printability, which I assume means I can at least save as a PDF. Even so, an static HTML export option would have made it even more compelling to setup a profile.
- _andychung 6y agoThis makes total sense, will look into more ways to export your data.
- fuddle 6y agoThis looks cool, really nice design. It would be good to list a few more example profiles, it's hard to get an idea of what a profile would look like by only seeing yours.
- _andychung 6y agoFor sure! I actually can't wait to remove my profile from the homepage completely, there are lots of great ones now.
- vbtemp 6y agoDefinitely beautiful and would love for something simple and clean to eat LinkedIn's lunch. I don't have much to add in addition to everyone else except this: I am really disturbed by the common meme of faces-inside-circles. Why do we need faces? It just distracts from the content. I love the idea of being able to link former colleagues together - that's neat - but I'm very anti-face and there are any number of ways to do it that does not involve people's pictures. Edit: Wow this got a lot of upvotes. So, I'll continue for a sec: There is so, so much conscious and unconscious judgment and game playing with pictures, I don't even know where to start. Let's leave this to be simple, clean and beautiful without the faces.
- etrautmann 6y agoThis is really tough - humans are hardwired to form connections and remember people by recognizing faces. This, of course, is also exactly the problem, in that it allows for bias or prejudice of many different types to influence our judgements. I think I agree with you that the downsides and inherent unfairness of the genetic attractiveness lottery outweigh the upsides of attaching a name to a face. It's an empirical question then whether this works for users.
- wsdrdsw 6y agoWith real names, faces are just one google search away for most people (and we could debate further what would it mean if a face wasn't found). Functionally the website would be a wasteland of white sameness without portraits, no way around that I think. I'm not entirely convinced this service solves the linkedin pitfall of mingling jumphoppers racking up impressive paper stats and polluting the signal.
- fakedang 6y ago> With real names, faces are just one google search away for most people (and we could debate further what would it mean if a face wasn't found). But it becomes an added hassle for those people, thus making it UX hostile for stalkers. Who is actually going to Google each and every other name on somebody else's collaborator list? Some determined stalkers I guess, but they are not going to be deterred anyways. On the point of faces not being found, as a counterexample, some of my former MDs did not put pics in their LinkedIn. Yet people in the industry knew them by name, even if they weren't rockstar investors or something. Having heard someone's name from other sources such as word of mouth or from newspaper articles is a much better signal than using names to recognize them.
- waynesonfire 6y agobeautiful design.
- throwaway212135 6y agoWhy did you add your personal pronouns? I don't understand why we are stating the obvious here.
- throwaway212135 6y agoWhy did you add in your personal pronouns? Are you saying that there are more than 2 sexes? Can you just change your sex with the flip of a switch? Let's end this trend of adding our pronouns to every social profile.
- rolae 6y agoIt looks beautiful, but please increase the contrast. Some texts are #aaa on #fff, which is almost illegible. This is an accessibility issue not just for people with impaired vision, also for people checking a page on a mobile phone on a sunny day.
- itsnot2020 6y agoLove the clean look, certainly a break from LinkedIn. Some minor feedback, it's strange that all the external links in your CV have an arrow next to them apart from the one at the very top of the page under your name [0] where you link to your website. [0] - https://read.cv/andy https://read.cv/andy
- zaczekadam 6y agoI like how clean and minimalistic the design is.
- brundolf 6y agoLooks really nice. Wondering if it would make sense to have sections for a list of skills and/or projects (rather than just work experience)?
- wGeF7H8Z59y985y 6y agoAlright, I get it, but I’m not the target audience. Could you build a product that’ll help me disappear without a trace? An opposite, if you will, of what you’ve built.
- CraigJPerry 6y agoI think this looks beautiful, definitely kudos for taking the time to finesse it so aesthetically. If i had 5 CVs of this format to review i think i’d appreciate a few usability tweaks. The information density is too low for me. I think my ideal situation when consuming CVs is an uber dense firehose consisting of only relevant info. I’d happily sacrifice the whitespace to have deeper detail about what was done in each role. I’d love if there was some consistency or key or colouring to help me figure out what each section contains. E.g. if i read the first job listing and achievements/differentiators were in one colour box, responsibilities in a different colour and data like tenure/industry etc were in another colour box - then i could rapidly scan the other historical entries to compare and contrast, e.g. to help me get a flavour for how this person has chosen to develop their career over time for example. Another thing i’d love is plenty of links to supporting info where available - git repos or published work etc. This is going to sound ridiculous but i find the read aloud feature of the edge browser’s reader view and the two finger swipe audio reader of ios to be super useful. I have the speed cranked way up and i’m freed to efficiently write notes. If the format lent itself to speed read-aloud, i’d be a massive fan.
- spectramax 6y agoI guess low contrast text is good design?
- MildlySerious 6y agoI never had a LinkedIn profile or similar. Might give this one a try, actually. I like the no bullshit approach. Lots of the sites and platforms we use try to be and do a hundred things at once. It's overwhelming sometimes, and exhausting most of the time.
- orange_puff 6y agoI almost never interact with Show HN projects but I am going to make an account. Good luck!
- jedberg 6y agoThis is a good start, but I'm not a huge fan of this the way it is now. First, the font is tiny for my old eyes. Not all of us, especially hiring managers, are still in their 20s and can read these tiny fonts. I measured it with a ruler and the text is 1mm tall. Also, the font is gray on white, which is pretty but hard to read. In contrast, Linkedin is three times bigger and black on white, much easier to read. Second, after looking at the example, I have almost no idea what you've done. All I see are job titles. I don't see any accomplishments or even job duties. It looks like I could add those things when I create my own profile, but having them missing on the example isn't a good look. Third, the face circles. I see face circles under each job, but they aren't clickable nor are there tooltips. I have no idea what those are. I assume they're other people who worked at the same place? Maybe connections of yours who have worked at the same place? That's a cool idea, but it needs to be more discoverable. At the very least a tooltip would be good. Overall, when I'm looking at a professional profile, I'm usually doing it because I want to hire or work with someone. The main information I want to know is 1) Do we have anyone in common I can ask about you? 2) What did you accomplish at your previous workplaces or otherwise? 3) Have you worked anywhere that I recognize and when, so I can ask my other friends who worked there if they know you? The face circles accomplish #1, so that's great. #2 looks possible, but the design seems to minimize the accomplishments, as opposed to Linkedin which sort of puts it in your face. And #3 seems to be covered but again the design minimizes the information I want most. I would say a good place to start would be asking yourself, "Why does Linkedin look the way it does?". A lot of their design comes from customer feedback, and their main customers are recruiters and hiring managers. Steal their good stuff and leave their dark patterns behind.
- zestyping 6y agoThis looks beautiful, except I have no idea why there are rows of tiny faces under some of the items. It's not at all clear what they mean, and they make the page ugly (in my opinion) by messing up the composition. As the only circular objects on the page, as numerous as they are, and as intensely saturated blobs on an otherwise calm, white document, they are incredibly loud. They're so loud that they almost make it harder to read the text. Just get rid of them.
- prodtorok 6y agoIt's clean, but clean as in it feels like there is nothing for me to look at or objectively accomplish
- offtop5 6y agoWould love an option to remove photos. Employment discrimination is absolutely rampant, and I would hate for someone who is perceived by Western society to be more attractive to be given a leg up on platforms like this. Scary enough the first thing many people do on dating apps is to hit the ethnic filter button ( proud to say I've been social media / dating app free for years), but now that same mindset's going to get applied to hiring people. If a youngish recruiter spends all day filtering out certain people on his dating apps, when he hops on LinkedIn or this thing here he's going to instinctively keep filtering people out. if someone's not physically attractive to you that absolutely should not have any role in their qualifications, if I ran the world photos on LinkedIn and this would be illegal since it's just an easy way to discriminate against people.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cubano 6y agoHiring, by definition, is mostly discrimination. Otherwise, people would just hire the first person you received a resume from who had the solid qualifications and experience you needed. But no...of course that's not what happens. Managers go through the Kabuki dance with the potential employee just trying to find a small "chink in the armor" to quickly disqualify them. It's called the "initial screen" of course, and the whole point is to find something to "discriminate" against and eliminate the candidate. Please PLEASE do NOT reply to this message saying "oh discriminating is the wrong term I'm simply EVALUATING blah blah blah" Yes whatever you like to call it the end result is exactly the same. Then, of course, the whole team does the same sort of "don't call it discrimination but if we notice some trait we don't like, we don't hire them" thing again. Maybe it's their age, or hair, or the clothes they wear, or the way they talked, or didn't talk. Maybe even sometimes, because the person is broke and hungry and they came off wrong, because of course, they don't have any income, or took a risk in their lives that didn't pan out, or perhaps even had to take care of a dying parent for a while, and now have to struggle to come up with an explanation on why they weren't working for that time. Maybe they even had a felony 20 years ago when they were totally different people...heaven forbid they did THAT because, of course, NO ONE in our amazing Foobar company EVER did anything illegal and didn't get caught! So that's really just only a matter of bad luck, but yet it's an absolute KoD with getting hired these days. What rarely ever happens, oddly enough, is to ask candidates to prove their programming skills with either a sample project or a trial period. This would seem like a very logical thing to do and it confounds me why it's not used more...and even if it is and the person aces the tests, if anything is found, well, discriminating about the candidate, well, we just cannot even take a chance on hiring them. And even though almost 25% of all "sure-fire" hires won't work out and will be gone in a year[0], and there are literally a million tech jobs[1] that need to be filled this year, we just cannot even take a chance on hiring them rings over and over in the offices of the hiring managers. THAT...of all things to rant about, is the thing that baffles and frustrates me more than anything... How can anyone ever prove they they can become a valuable part of the team if no one will ever give them a chance? [0] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/software-had-the-highest-job-turnover-rate-of-any-industry-in-2017/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/software-had-the-highes... [1] https://blog.hackerrank.com/unlocking-trapped-engineers/ https://blog.hackerrank.com/unlocking-trapped-engineers/
- markdown 6y agoLooks promising, congrats! To make it more useful, I recommend increasing the font size and using darker text. The most basic requirement of a CV is that it be legible.
- throwaway158497 6y agoBeautiful. Good work. For software engineers involved in building UIs, I think there should be embedded iframes or some such thing showing their portfolio.
- servercobra 6y agoI like the clean, simple design and anything to take on LinkedIn is great in my book. The font is really small though. Is there a business model? I'm always rather hesitant to put time into projects like this without some sort of business model to keep them running. I've been burned too often by sites either shutting down, going by the wayside, or switching to ads/other less desirable business models eventually.
- accented 6y agoFaces aside, why does it need a pronoun right next to the name? Looks nice and all, but I'll start using one of these sites when they focus on work history and products instead of pictures and pronouns.
- signaru 6y agoCould a word/character limit also be considered? I have seen people who write bloated almost-autobiographies wherever an online profile allows them to.
- robmay 6y agoAny thoughts about making this an open platform where people own their own data but apps are built on top of it? And users can design their own UIs too? I'd be an early paying customer of that API.
- emrah 6y agoHow would that work exactly, could you elaborate a bit more?
- mjgs 6y agoThis looks nice, I like it. One thing that worries me about CV social networks is the possibility of that site going away or loosing it’s relevance. Once you have lots of comments/recommendations etc, loosing that could really cause issues to your employability. I don’t know what the solution is, maybe some type of distributed crypto bitcoin setup?
- peterkos 6y agoClean design, but the contrast could be a lot better (light gray on white). Company logos would be cool too!
- awaisraad 6y agoIts simple and beautiful :) Can we make profile images optional?
- SmellTheGlove 6y agoHow do you intend, or not intend, to monetize this data? In other words, what are you going to do with my information? I think it looks great and I'm really inclined to create a profile. However, I already get a ton of spam, and thanks to Linkedin, sales people now call me on my personal phone - something that isn't even exposed to anyone not in my network. I worry about something like this needing to make money and getting bought by someone that needs the data. That said, I could just shut up and use it, since my data is already out there. :D
- systemvoltage 6y agoCVs should be done in times new roman font or some basic font that doesn't scream. As boring as possible. Use a LaTeX, microsoft word, or some basic document layout tool and make a resume. If you need to make the resume look pretty, you're making up for something. No offense meant. This is how the real world works - try applying to jobs with a beautiful resume.
- colmvp 6y ago> This is how the real world works - try applying to jobs with a beautiful resume. Not in my experience. I got interviewed at top tech companies and joined a well-respected one after submitting a 'beautiful' resume which I really only spent a few hours designing. One of the tech interviewers thanked me for putting the time and effort into it, especially not trying to fill the entire page with as many bullet points as possible. A good design can't make up for a lack of experience in a field, but I don't think it's nearly as detrimental as you're making it to be.
- systemvoltage 6y agoI am glad it worked out for you. That's awesome. I am afraid though, its an exception. More discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24777640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24777640 I bought this book and they've done a lot of analysis around "prettifying" resumes.
- germanka 6y agoClean design, I like the UI
- kuzimoto 6y agoI think this is an interesting idea, and would like to follow the progress. My only complaint is that the site is entirely unusable without JavaScript. Perhaps consider including some content with in addition to the notice of enabling JavaScript. I get most sites aren't designed with NoScript users in mjnd, but being able to see a little information before whitelisting the domain would be nice.
- programmerslave 6y agoDude the world uses JavaScript, stop making these comments on every thread
- kuzimoto 6y agoI don't mind if a site doesn't work as intended, but is it too much to ask to get something more than "You need to enable JavaScript to run this app." I didn't realize viewing text or images without client side JS was an unreasonable ask.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- natmaka 6y agoA way to publish information (mainly the "About" rant) written in languages other than English may boost adoption.
- gorgoiler 6y agoVery nice. Lots of beautiful and simple design of which we need more on the web. FYI there’s a rendering bug when I move back and forward in iOS 14. If I visit FAQ then Support, then swipe back to return to the FAQ page I briefly see the Support page fade in, followed by the FAQ page.
- jhoutromundo 6y agoPrinting button doesn't seem to be working. Firefox 84, Debian.
- optymizer 6y agoAndy, congratulations on shipping a product! It's a good idea and using .cv for CVs is a nice touch. That said, here's how your website looks on my 27" 2560x1440 display: https://i.imgur.com/5dsRIlN.png https://i.imgur.com/5dsRIlN.png I'm sorry, but I have to be harsher than usual with my (granted, unsolicited) feedback now because you've been a designer for 11 years and I find your design - to be blunt - inconsiderate and inconsistent. I hope you can school me on design in general by answering these questions: 1. Why is 3/4 of my screen empty space, while 1/2 of the content is invisible, forcing me to scroll down like I ran out of screen space? Seems inconsiderate. 2. Did you make this website for your own use, or for other people to use as well? If for other people, then why are you not accounting for the fact that lightgray on white is difficult to read in general, but especially hard to read for older folks? Seems inconsiderate. 3. What are the tiny circles with pictures supposed to tell me on the home page? They're just super tiny images with no information or tooltips. Seems inconsiderate. 4. Why do the "Create profile" and "View examples" CTAs look like buttons, but the mouse pointer is different when hovering on them? Seems inconsistent. 5. Why are you messing with the scrollbar to force me to scroll through the main CV? Seems inconsiderate. 6. Why is the "View example" button taking me to a page that wastes my time by showing me the exact same CV that I am forced to scroll through on the main page? Seems inconsiderate. 7. Why is the text on the main CV not selectable, yet on the "View Example" page it is selectable? Seems inconsistent. 8. Why are the links in the footer so close together? Seems inconsistent with the rest of the spacing on the page.
- justynadorsz 6y agoThat reminds of what - I think, not sure - Paul Graham once said, that what is applied to stupidity of the founders is just that they have little time and other priorities. Don't remember the exact quote. You are saying that Andy is inconsiderate in every other line. When most likely he had tons of other things to do. You can either make sure all your hover cursors and the spacing between links are consistent. Or you can ship.
- optymizer 6y agoI see all this stylish eye candy on the page (animated transitions, rounded corners, dialogs with dark overlay) that takes time and care to implement, but there was just not enough time to make the text legible before shipping, eh? It's clear that some of these were design choices and have nothing to do with shipping faster. The others are just inconsistencies that go against the general polish that the design aspires to convey.
- iwangulenko 6y agoTech recruiter here. Pros: + Very beautifully designed project + Super readability Big, easy to fix negative: Force people to add months to the years! You only asks the year when someone started in "Work Experience". If I read "2012-2013" I can't tell if someone has been at a place ~12 months or ~1 month. This information is very important. Also, please calculate the durations to allow readers to grasp tenure faster. Sometimes people need to skim through 200 CVs per day, so every inch of improvement is a big deal. Check how Linkedin does it: "May 2012 - June 2012, 1 year 1 month" Here a video where I improve some CVs, maybe that helps to make the product better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haQ4rtEjhJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haQ4rtEjhJQ
- rognjen 6y ago> If I read "2012-2013" I can't tell if someone has been at a place ~12 months or ~1 month. Or even 24 months...
- jacob_rezi 6y agohey there - you might be interested in our product - https://rezi.io https://rezi.io
- rognjen 6y agoFYI the "Rezi Is A Resume Builder For Top Companies" sections doesn't work well on mobile.
- GoToRO 6y ago"This information is very important." Years != Experience ...but thanks for confirming the shallowness of the recruiting processes we've all experienced.
- ThomPete 6y agothats not how i read the OP
- iwangulenko 6y ago
- denysvitali 6y agoCool but... no language skills? If this is tailored for the states, it kind of makes sense - but there are different realities (such as Switzerland), where being bilingual / trilingual is an huge asset to the skillset (:
- amitport 6y agoAgree. Additionally, I think it should in general allow sections with custom titles. For example currently there is a 'writing' section, but as a researcher you want 'publications' (which is pretty much the same, but names matters).
- Uptrenda 6y agoIt's become a web trend to waste 60% of the screen by making ultra-thin, column sites with microscopic text. I don't know why. Apparently having a site 'look good' trumps being able to read it? I was curious what the font size for this site was and it seems to be 14px for key sections which is honestly way too small. On websites that optimize for readability (like news websites) you see at least 18px and upwards. They also don't force the text into a micro-column forcing you to scroll for pages to read a few sentences. I also think the color / background isn't helping with readability. Black text contrasts terribly with a white background and makes it feel like you're staring at a light bulb. Imagine if PDF readers used the same style for rendering. People would probably go blind before finishing one book. I think hiring managers will be sitting through a lot of CVs on this site and they would probably appreciate it far more if you optimized for readability over appearance.
- parsecs 6y agoThere is an option of dark mode once you register. I do fully agree with all your points though. Seems like retina/high dpi displays were not really considered during the design
- polk 6y agoI think the design is great, just too small. Try viewing the demo (https://read.cv/andy https://read.cv/andy) on desktop at 125% zoom. Pretty much perfect.
- rognjen 6y agoI think the landing page should be adjusted so that the embedded resume doesn't look like the final product. Perhaps screenshots of the sections and features instead. A decent amount of feedback here seems to be because people didn't click view example. And I'd also add the ability to have generic sections or entries. Something for lists especially. For instance languages or certifications, or certifications.
- abinaya_rl 6y agoThis really looks neat! Feedback + If there is a downloadable version of CV that will be helpful, maybe LaTeX pdf download? + Adapt the JSON Resume[1] schema [1] - https://jsonresume.org/ https://jsonresume.org/
- vikin9 6y agoLooks very nice to get the first impression over a person. There is usually a lot of hints and information in the Internet about how to build such first-impression CV. However, EU companies (maybe elsewhere too?) often ask about second-impression CV with more technical details. I search for a tool helping you to build your coding experience matrix. Imagine a chart looking similar to Github activity tiles or a spreadsheet, where on the x-axis you present time, and on the y-axis you place the coding languages or technologies that you have used in that time. Such thing would help telling the interviewer, that you have 3 years of C++ experience, but your last project on this was in 2013. Anyone seen something like this? edit: grammar & typos
- Psype 6y agoHi @_andychung, have you ever considered jsonresume ? Personally I use it to generate my CV on various templates.
- Rompect 6y ago88 HTTP requests, damn...
- warnemuende 6y agoLove the idea and the design as well. No clue if my points are mentioned in the comments already. # Scale down face images If you decide keeping the face images please scale them down to a thumbnail size. You make my browser load a 400x400 pixel image for than displaying it as 24x24 pixel. You can safe quite some bandwidth on your (and my) side. Another option would to completely remove the images in favor of https://blurha.sh/ https://blurha.sh/ as the images are so small, that detail are not seen anyways. # Server side rendering for SEO Please render the site on the server, so it can be used without javascript, can be crawled by google and is a lot faster as well. You could leverage a service like: https://www.seo4ajax.com/ https://www.seo4ajax.com/ so you don't have to actually build a server side rendering pipeline. # Check for web accessibility I would enjoy having my CV being accessible to a wide array of humans. Some of the contrast and the font size seems to not be optimal for that (and also some screenreaders have problems with the javascript stuff => see server side rendering) https://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://read.cv/andy https://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://read.cv/andy # Email + password login I am privacy aware and delete my cookies quite often. The process of waiting for the email and than opening the link (which is broke btw if it is not opened in the same context as the login window) is annoying. Please let me use a username+password to login. (Which can be auto filled by my browser) # Export as PDF Here in Germany quite some companies still want printed out CVs or at least PDFs. Would be greate to be able to send them a link to an autogenerated PDF e.g. https://read.cv/andy/pdf https://read.cv/andy/pdf Keep up the work.
- mfbx9da4 6y agoI am stuck in this state https://imgur.com/8tbkQt4 https://imgur.com/8tbkQt4 didn't create any data in my profile so can no longer edit it! Edit: I have a masssssive screen so didn't see the edit in the bottom left!
- 1337shadow 6y agoGreat! I've been wondering for a while if I should do my own but I've been living fine with my StackOverflow CV. Nonetheless I have created a CV there on read.cv/jpic and tried all the features and have a couple of ideas: - I tried "Print to file" to export a PDF because a lot of times sites ask you to upload a PDF, it turned out only the first page got out, this might be a bug, another thing is that we don't see the picture and there's not much colors - It would be great to be able to create several CVs, when I apply to a corpo dev job I show a corpo dev CV and when I apply for a freelancer job I show a freelancer CV and when I apply to a corpo management job I show another and so on
- Shinchy 6y agoReally lovely work, I think it makes for a great digital CV.
- gigatexal 6y agoLove the idea and second the "to pdf" feature requests but on a high-dpi screen the text is a bit small and hard to read, some css tweaks are probably needed to make it perfect. Kudos.
- darekkay 6y agoSome constructive tips on making the design more accessible/inclusive: - "gray-3" on white has a really low contrast ratio (confirmed by others in this thread) - remove "maximum-scale=1" from your viewport meta tag - use semantic HTML / landmarks (e.g. "aside" instead of "div id='sidebar'") - add a label to your "sidebar-toggle" button
- Arkdy 6y agoWhat's your real name policy? And there's probably a typo in your FAQ, "We do not allow sexual of adult content or any kind."
- enriquto 6y agoI only see a white page (probably due to usage of an ad blocker, ublock origin).
- fumblebee 6y agoThis is really beautiful, but then again my reference point is the overly bloated, always slow, and hideously designed site that is LinkedId. Added bonus for HN readers, because it's only just been released you can probably bag a nice @username.
- franga2000 6y agoThis looks really nice and I especially love the neat URLs! One thing it got me thinking: since the UI is really nice, could this be an opportunity to create a defacto standard computer-readable format for CVs? Something that I could upload or link into a job application site and it would automatically extract the required info or put through various converters to get different designs and formats. I guess the second part specifically would be in a way competing with your core product, but I'm sure many people would appreciate the ability to get data out (and maybe in?) using some kind of text format (this might also possibly be required by the GDPR, but I don't know too much about that).
- mapster 6y agowhat are your plans for it?