When most people are faced with the task of building their resume, they fire up Microsoft Word, trudge through a few generic looking templates, and export their page to HTML. Usually this results in something that’s either boring, weird looking (because of formatting issues), or just plain ugly. JobSpice, a new startup that’s launching tonight, is looking to help users build web-friendly resumes that are as good looking as they are easy to customize.
JobSpice comes with a good pedigree: it is part of the latest batch of Y Combinator funded startups, and is co-founded by Andrew McCollum — a Facebook co-founder who served as the social network’s original designer.
Of course, there are already plenty of ways to build your resume — aside from Word, there are a number of online services that will do it for a price, though founders McCollum and Dane Hurtubise say that these generally can be pricey, going for upwards of $100.
In contrast, JobSpice is free, and it goes a long way toward making resumes visually appealing with a minimum amount of effort. To do this, the site takes advantage of the naturally structured formatting of resumes and optimizes it for the web. JobSpice uses CSS to style the resumes it generates, which means you can totally rework the appearance of your resume with a minimal amount of effort (and experienced web designers will be able to tweak their resumes to their hearts’ content).
At launch JobSpice only has around ten designs available, but it’s allowing users and graphic designers to submit their own designs to the library, which will then be shared with everyone. For now all of these designs will remain free, through the company hasn’t ruled out offering premium designs at some point in the future.
Because of the modular design of each resume built by the service, JobSpice makes it easy to customize resumes for each person you send them to. Simply check off which sections you’d like to include in your resume depending on what an employer is interested in, and the site will generate a unique URL for that version of the resume. You can also easily export your resume to PDF.
To monetize, JobSpice has a few strategies in mind. In the short term, they’re going to offer premium features like custom domains. Further down the line, the company is hoping to use its service to streamline the hiring process, allowing employers to more effectively search through candidates and to help candidates find jobs. Given that there are obviously some very established sites in this space like Monster and CareerBuilder this is likely going to be quite challenging, though there is certainly still plenty of room for improvement on these.
Perfect timing in this economy – i will definitely use this!
interesting timing on this… emurse.com has been out for about 3 years, and is pretty dang cool. They were recently acquired by AOL, but got some great traction on their own before the acquisition.
Also, VisualCV.com has been around for (I think) at least 18 months. A lot of flashy video and graphic stuff.
I like the simplicity of jobspice and emurse, and the flashy capability of visualcv.com.
Nonetheless, good to see TC picking up on stuff from the job/career space.
Jason Alba
CEO – JibberJobber.com – personal relationship manager to organize your job search
Awesome tool, now i don’t need to play with MS Office for creating the resume
Wow, way to complicate things. Just use Word for christ sake.
+1
Have you tried to use Word to make a resume lately? It’s agonizing.
Really? Agonizing to make a resume? I wouldn’t want to hire you if something as simple to do in word as write a resume was agonizing and stopped you dead in your tracks. Sheesh!
Ditto. I can make a resume on Word just fine. (I can also put my resume on to a wiki and build it on linkedin.) The trick with resumes is going with simplicity so that scanners can read them easily. Trying to spice things up on Word to make things super fancy is where people go wrong.. on so many levels.
i would rather hire someone who DOESNT use word
What industry are you that you would have such a preference?
Id rather use word also John Doe this is way useless. This is only good if like monster.com had it then again I still would not use it.
Word blows. this looks nice, but I still prefer creating my resume in Apple’s Pages or Adobe InDesign.
I’ve been pretty happy with http://xmlresume.sf.net but a lot of folks might not have the time or inclination to do it that way.
There was an online web upload/export version of xmlresume at one point but appears to have been taken down.
JobSpice seems very zippy by comparison.
Actually, we looked at this early on in our design process, and elected that XHTML+CSS made more sense for the web than XML+XSL.
We output our resumes as valid XHTML with the hResume microformat, so the data is still easy to parse and reuse.
I’m very impressed with the UI treatments and rendering. It’s like hResume Creator on steroids!
Microformats!! Rock on! That is the way to go!!!
You know Word has Templates for any resume you could possibly one. You can download it straight from Word. Lol
As a former career development coach and lecturer, this is pretty neat. We were spending A LOT of money on some custom solutions, although they did a bit more than just make the resume.
However, the site is down for me. Anyone else experiencing this?
Site is back up.
PS: Congratulations on launching.
Been feeding a lot of career coaches at our local soup kitchen.
I’ve just updated my resume using the site’s service, and it’s fantastic. Easy and attractive.
Awesome idea, I’ve been wanting to build this for the longest time now. Here’s an idea if you’re thinking of using Word: stop printing the stuff off, stop packaging PDFs, and just send a !@#$ link! You can update it all you want, and you don’t need to worry about sending updated versions or keeping track of anything. Nice work guys!
How can people expect to do this when they cannot do their resume in WORD or Text Format? I seriously doubt recruiter can accept resumes in this format.
@ Shashidhar: I think the challenge for everyone will continue to be what content goes on to the resume. As for the formatting, this really helps! You should see some of the resumes I’ve seen from job seekers with no resume-building training…
It would probably depend on the industry that you are in. If you’re working in social media or web programming, this might be a nice solution. If you’re working in education, probably not so much. (Though if they really want to jam, they would work with school districts around the US to build something like this in for a more universal application to ease that process. Course, the downside would be that it would make it easier for people to mass apply to more schools making education jobs harder to get… but I digress.)
Not bad! I still think that I like VisualCV.com better.
Agreed, VisualCV wins hands down. Maybe they should have called it VisualResume.com
Awesome job Dane and Andrew. Glad that the first time I get to see the site is on Techcrunch.
I havent looked at the service…But Please. If you are going to plant comments – space them out a little bit.
You would not see this many positive comments on techrunch if redbull gave away a free iphone with every purchase.
And the y-combinator crowd is supposed to be the best and the brightest? too obvious guys.
Yawn… all job sites are dying since there’s NO JOBS and unemployment is sky high! We don’t need more crappy job sites when there’s a dearth of actual jobs.
Doesn’t that mean MORE resumes? *shrug*
I hate using Word because I end up with lots of different copies of my resume. With JobSpice, I like the idea of always having access to a master copy of my resume. Very flexible so far, keep up the good work!
@ Brian Sutcliffe:
It’s not a “job site,” it’s a resume builder. See for yourself.
Wow, so you put this site up for what reason? Out of the goodness of your hearts? You’re providing a free service to people out of your own pocket, just like facebook? What is your revenue model? Don’t tell me…. advertising?
Let me go throw up.
Congrats, Dane and Andrew!
What about emurse.com? They had this four years ago. Are they around?
emurse.com has very well for me, i see no reason to switch. i see now they have AOL branding ..never noticed that before, but whatever.
resumebuilder.com has been online literally for years.
A lot of universities in the USA have career centers. Those career centers frequently have websites where they offer a multitude of different Word based templates for resumes and cover letters for people trying to get various types of jobs… which seems like the same principle.
Yeah, we’re still around
In fact, we were acquired by AOL not all to long ago.
Lot’s of cool stuff in development right now. Stay tuned.
Best,
Alex Rudloff
Emurse.com
If you need help with your resume, I HIGHLY recommend using a professional editor. Usually it’s a quick job and hence quite cheap, especially when you look at the better chance of landing a higher paying job.
Jasmine Young Editing is one editor I love working with (mostly on press releases and web site content).
Also, I think they’ll need a Word export feature since so many people demand you e-mail them a Word version.
Nice work, simple is best.
Funny, I just wrote a résumé creator that prints out to LaTeX and semantically marked-up HTML+RDFa and was toying with doing a web port (http://github.c...ume/tree/master).
Seems like résumé tools ideas are in the air these-a-days.
That would be very cool if Job Spice would had more markup in RDFa
Well, I was just about to start updating my resume tonight, so I’ll definitely give this a look.
Eerie timing.
Is there any word on interoperability of the resumes? It would be a killer feature to be able to export them to the various formats of different employers (e.g. HR-XML, Europass CV, United Nations, etc.). This way, you don’t have to manually copy and paste every time.
Also, how does Jobspice relate to the stuff going on in the ePortfolio space?
Yeah, man, for the 3 people that needs to export to those formats, that’s definitely something they’re looking at. Come on, Michael!
You do realise that employability data interoperability is high on the agenda of various governments, large companies and educational institutions, especially as the financial crisis has given birth to a large number of unemployed people that need to be retrained/relocated?
There are hundreds of thousands of people already inputting this kind of resume data in some silo (whether it is in school or in companies). Getting that data out is the real challenge, not replicating it over and over again.
Great service, almost as good as webCV’s resume creator!
impossible is nothing theme, ftw.
Oh c’mon, this is a solution for a problem that has been solved DOZENS of times already. How many ways do we need to format a resume?
How about just sticking with:
- This is who I am
- This is what I’ve achieved
- This is what I’m looking for
- These are my qualifications
- These are my references
YC – will you fund me $25K to develop an HTML/CSS template?
Good grief! No wonder twitter is popular in the Valley.
LinkedIn should buy them…yesterday. They really need this functionality.
now, if only it would have an import/export API and some developer libraries so others could integrate it…
Second this. If could make your jobspice CV automatically extract data from your linked in profile and export to pdf/.doc, you’ve got solid gold.
You can import your LinkedIn profile on VisualCV.com
seems like a useful little site
Techcrunch! You write articles about just launched sites with no traffic that help people make CVs but have never featured WikiJob – a bootstrap startup social network that wth no VC funding whatsoever now brings in over 110,000 unqiues a month and turns a substantial profit! Talk to us!
uh, why doesn’t somebody write a clever parser that will convert a linkedin profile into a resume for word or pdf format??? that way, people can continue to update on linkedin and not deal with “yet another site, yet another password, yet another request to enter all of the same information again”
anybody????
visualcv.com pulls your LinkedIn data into your CV automatically, which helps give you a baseline to work from. Obviously depending on how detailed your LI profile is, you get an instant CV.
Not sure if you can update following LI updates though …
Not digging the color palette at all. Also, I think what job seekers need more assistance with is content not necessarily format.
Its looks to be a useful site. Thanks Jason
Am I missing something? Where is the import? You really don’t want to retype or cut’n'paste it in.
A resume is still a resume however you look at it and create it. This is only one aspect of your job search as almost any employer will still Google your name and look for you on other professional websites. Your online presence will expand upon and fill in the gaps due to the limits of this single piece of paper.
Don’t rely solely on a resume to get you a job, it takes a lot more than that.
Do you think you can tie up with schools and universities to create a custom format for them? 1000’s of us are required to create resumes in specific formats that can only be done on ms-word or a similar client based software
How does it matter how your resume is formatted? I am surprised that people are still coming out with better looking resume, resume writing services, etc. The real problem is not in how the resume is formatted, to be honest. The real problem is in people finding the job that matches their work profile and for companies/recruiters finding the right candidate for the job. In essence what is important is are you suitable for the job or not, Not how your resume looks.
Co-founder
JobsbyRef.com
A resume beautification service is like a photo embellishment service on a matrimonial site!
A more elaborate discussion at http://blog.san...-stand-out.html
I agree with Laura. As a recruiter, I review hundreds of resumes a day. Recruiters and employers make a yes/no decision in approx 5 seconds. We also use Applicant Tracking Systems which score resumes based on keywords and display Word resumes converted to HTML. This is why it’s critical to create a keyword/content rich resume with minimal Word formatting.
ResuWe.com is launching Labor Day.