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.
