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Show HN: Interactive AI Resume/LinkedIn for better networking/job hunting

protoconstruct.com

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Show HN: Interactive AI Resume/LinkedIn for better networking/job hunting

#1

Post by anyeung »

Generally, I found resumes too vague to get to know anyone (hence why no one networks with them), professional blogs too low ROI, walking up to people unscalable, and cold messaging fairly low success-rate.

I wanted the 'marketing tool' of networking to get myself out there. Something that lets me: 1) Draw people into a conversation before they've realized it 2) Make them remember me and ultimately reach out to me 3) See what people asked me so I can further refine my interactive profile and start the networking cycle again

So I built a website where anyone can create these interactive profiles starting with a resume import.

The one I linked is a test profile but on my personal one, I got: 1) >10x more people reaching out to me when I put myself out there to network (some were VCs actually; though I'm not fundraising right now) 2) A bunch of engagement questions where I can see what people want to know about me so I can further enhance my profile and improve my own outreach

This is still in early stages, but if I go to a conference/join a new team at a new job/need to network for some other reason, I think I'll put this on my LinkedIn/business card/etc.

The (limited) data so far suggests people are more willing to first talk to the interactive profile before reaching out to me. I guess that makes sense, it's less commitment than emailing me. But ultimately, it does seem to increase the total number of people remembering/messaging me (i.e. improving the professional networking funnel as it were).

I would love y'all's thoughts on it

Edit: I can see some of you asking questions lol. Way more fun than LinkedIn's 'This random person looked at your profile but what did they want to know? We have no idea'.

Show HN: Interactive AI Resume/LinkedIn for better networking/job hunting
protoconstruct.com

Re: Show HN: Interactive AI Resume/LinkedIn for better networking/job hunting

#5

Post by yawnxyz »

This is kind of cool, but there are NO affordances. It's like you walk into a restaurant and you have to ask the waiter exactly what food they have, and they'll answer your question, but you never know if you they gave you the breadth of what the restaurant serves. Frustrating!

Better if you had a snapshot of what's on offer, and then you could ask a special thing (does this dish contain nuts; I'm allergic) etc. — similarly, would be nice to have a small snapshot of the work, and then I could ask what specifically a person did on a project, see some demos / github, etc

Re: Show HN: Interactive AI Resume/LinkedIn for better networking/job hunting

#8

Post by anyeung »

yawnxyz wrote: post #5

This is kind of cool, but there are NO affordances. It's like you walk into a restaurant and you have to ask the waiter exactly what food they have, and they'll answer your question, but you never know if you they gave you the breadth of what the restaurant serves. Frustrating! Better if you had a snapshot of what's on offer, and then you could ask a special thing (does this dish contain nuts; I'm allergic) etc. — si…

Great callout. I don't actually see this replacing LinkedIn profiles or resumes, more like an add-on so you can figure out more about a person. Example: "Proficient in C++", that's about as much as you get from a resume. But what projects did I use C++ in? What tooling did I use? Did it ship in a product?

Better yet, the interactive profile should say 'yes, they worked on C++ on these projects, here's a link to the specific github project'.

Eventually, if this turns out to actually be a good idea and gain traction, I'd want to build recruiter/candidate matching tools that let you just ask 'I need someone who's worked on Raytracing Shader Compilers before'. Something very narrow and specialized and it should still be able to bring up the 50 people in the world who have that intersection, then you can ask those people's profiles for more about their experience.

Other crazy idea: The resume and linked in profiles are like the table of contents of your career. Why do I have to write the table of contents and not just generate from my append-only work history. The table of contents of documents are generated, why is my resume not generated from something persistent instead.

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