Most of the time it's recruiters who want a docx file so they can fudge certain points and mislead the employer into giving you an interview, for which they undoubtedly get paid commission for.
Just saying. Some people are fine with this. I personally don't trust any recruiter that won't happily accept a PDF or at least tell me why they want the resume changed.
It was a sad day when LinkedIn retired the official resume generator. It would be nice if they could at least export some XML for anyone to run with, but I guess its all about locking users into your walled off service.
I read somewhere about an EU regulations coming which would force platforms to provide a way for their users to get their data back. Reimplementing the XML export would be a good way to (partially) comply ahead of time.
That's "data portability" section of the GDPR, coming late May.
The idea behind it is that platforms should provide you with an option to export your data so that you could easily import it to a competing service if you have a desire to do so.
With that said, I signed into my LinkedIn account for the first time in about a year and saw the option to download my data already in my account settings: https://i.imgur.com/bOLqwoJ.png
EU even have a standard format for structured resume exchange called Europass.
interop.europass.cedefop.europa.eu/data-model/
See also the provided online editor: http://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/
It's a shame that LinkedIn/Viadeo don't have builtin import/export to this format.
The new regulation updates that existing right to specify that the data should be provided in a "structured, commonly used and machine-readable format".
I believe the writer is referring to the GDPR regulations in Europe which are coming into force May 25, 2018, therefore "ahead of time" is chronologically accurate.
They have a handy countdown clock here:
I actually just started looking into porting it to Firefox. I haven't made any extensions for FF before - and this is my first Chrome extension as well - so I'm not sure how much work it'll be to convert it. But it's definitely on the top of my todo list.
Thanks a lot. Really appreciate it. I see that you are also the person behind indeed resume. I have used it too many times to count. Thanks a lot for that.
The main difference between Chrome and Firefox extensions is that Chrome uses a callback-based API while Firefox's is based on promises. Other than that they're functionally the same aside from some differences in the manifest and the namespace (Chrome uses `chrome` while Firefox uses `browser`). I think Firefox has some backwards compatibility with the callback interface for easier porting but I haven't tried.
There's a nice polyfill by Mozilla so you can use their promise interface in Chrome but it was missing some important apis last I checked (sessions and optional permissions). https://github.com/mozilla/webextension-polyfill
Honestly, I'd rather have my resume turned into my LinkedIn. My reasoning is that when something comes to LinkedIn, it doesn't come out easily: it's proprietary and it's hostile. So it can't be where you trust to save your primary data.
Makes sense, though I don’t think it’ll happen soon, considering LinkedIn holds a lot more information than the average 1 page resume. I don’t keep all my work experience on my resume.
Exactly. That was the hardest part of making this extension... trying to decide what to strip off of peoples' profiles to get it to fit on a single page.
Single page has really gone out of style for experienced talent (if ot ever was in for those people). People switch jobs too much and the way resumes steer stored and read has changed since that was the standard. Mine is three dense pages and that is still heavily trimmed.
The most important part of my resume is the top third of the first page that lists skills, technologies, and finance specific information that allow a recruiter or target person to easily see I do and get a feeling for my career path without having to go into the job specific details yet. I don't really see a way to do something like that.
I really like it, but it would be good to have an editable version beyond just the text, either with a Microsoft Word or HTML/CSS. It would be good to be able to tinker around with the template to personalize it more, such as adding different sections.
Thats the next thing I plan on doing. I made the site ineedaresu.me a few years ago, and I'm going to build something similar, but much better, based off what I have here.
In the past I’ve used high dpi screenshots and way too much time in photoshop to edit my LinkedIn page into a printable format that feels just like LinkedIn but doesn’t have all the extraneous crap around it you get on an actual printout.
People have responded super well to that approach when I’ve handed it out in meetings. All the LinkedIn chrome makes it feel very easy and familiar and authoritatively correct to them.
Any chance you could do a theme that’s as close to pure LinkedIn as possible? I basically want the print template that LinkedIn’s site should have rather than the one it does have.
>So you're saving and selling my information, then?
>No. The information on your LinkedIn profile never leaves LinkedIn - except for your email address, which I am saving to use with some features in the future. I won't sell it, and I won't annoy you with pointless emails.
I think it's important to state this on the front page, particularly by the "No strings attached" section. Many would consider collecting their email an "attached string".
Otherwise, I think this is great -- looking forward to more updates!
I want to be open about collecting emails. Honestly I have no plan for them... maybe an update newsletter... on my last resume site I made, I think I sent 1 email in the 3 years I had the list of active users.
But I also don't want to just slap something on the home page saying that I collect emails - there's not really any place for it to fit in the design.
I do have it clearly on the TOS and FAQ pages though. I changed the wording on the homepage so people wouldn't think I'm not collecting anything.
I still don't understand why people would give their information/data to LinkedIn. Their tactics over the years have been extremely scummy (harvesting contacts and sending spam is the one that immediately springs to mind).
I'm also inexplicably giving money to LinkedIn. I signed up for their premium plan so long ago, back when it was 200 something a year. They recently shot the price straight through the roof nearly doubling it while removing some features and restricting them to even higher paying tiers.
I however, have been grandfathered in to the original price and keep all the original feature set. However, if I quit or cancel my subscription or there is a lapse in payment I lose this benefit forever.
It's scummy as fuck. Designed purposely so I never let go.
I don't understand how you can't understand this. Yes, I have a lot of issues with them. But they are definitely not a solution looking for a problem.
They supposedly have 128 m accounts in the US, and there are circa 150 m total people employed here. Even assuming account inflation, I'm sure the majority of professionals have accounts. Certainly when I'm screening resumes, it's very rare for a person not to be on LinkedIn. They've been going since 2002 and are a profitable business that sold for $26 bn. This should be a sign to you that even if it's not your thing, somebody's getting value.
Paper resumes were a giant pain in the ass. LinkedIn is a pretty obvious solution to the problems with paper resumes, including that they are hard to write, a pain to update, hard to format, impossible to search, and impossible to use in aggregate. This is obviously great for people hiring, but also great for those seeking employment. During a job search, LinkedIn lets you ask questions like, "Who do I know who works at company X? Who do I know who can introduce me to somebody at company X? Who used to work at Company X so I can get the unvarnished truth about what it's like to work there?" Try that with paper resumes.
TL;DR: People use it because it makes finding jobs and/or employees easier than what went before it. Lots of people.
Which is a little odd, I mean, if you put it on LinkedIn you already gave it away to corporate data banks. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice feature and all, but I honestly wouldn’t care if it stole any of the info I already decided to make freely available on the internet.
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My girlfriend is a recruiter and spends a good amount of time formatting resumes of her clients. When I saw this I figured it would be a dream come true for her and anyone in her industry. Unfortunately resumes she submits have to follow a template created by her company.
Do you have any future plans to allow customizable resume templates?
Hey OP! Here's a paid SaaS solution to implement and expand on.
As a consultant I'd love to have an easy customized theme, where I can pick a font, colors and upload logo. Would probably pay one time fee to get started and maybe a small fee to update an existing with new info? Or a fee per sent resume? The time this would save would be so worth it.
Thanks! I've actually done something similar in the past. I made ineedaresu.me a few years ago (and have since sold it)... but after launching that, I had a few different schools and organizations contact me wanting custom resume generators styled how they like, with custom themes, fields, etc.
This extension is basically the start of a recreation of ineedaresu.me. I'll be working on a full resume generator next that doesn't rely on LinkedIn.
I'm exploring with a sort of "theme engine" to let people make and style custom themes. It's not as easy as just using CSS, since each layout/theme reorganizes the actual sections as well.
But I've done something similar in the past. I made the site ineedaresu.me, and have since made a few custom resume generators for different schools and organizations, styled how they like it, with custom fields, etc.
Great project! This will be used by recruiters like myself. Only today I had to send an ugly Linkedin-PDF resume because an applicant didn't have anything else. I would have used ceev.io, if I knew about it before!
Let me ask, aren't you afraid of this: If you get big enough, Linkedin will fiddle with their HTML and your app won't work anymore, right?
I've thought about that... If things change and break, it should be pretty easy to fix as long as LinkedIn doesn't make massive changes... The extension just goes through the page and extracts the elements that contain what I need.
So to get the person's name, it just looks for h1.pv-top-card-section__name and grabs that.
As long as what I need is available and visible on the page, I should be able to grab it.
The next thing I'm working on is something similar to ineedaresu.me (a project I made a few years ago) - but with a ton of improvements and better themes and customization options. It'll work the same as this extension, but it won't rely on LinkedIn - you'll have to enter the content yourself.
Still, the geek in me is a bit unhappy. LinkedIn will change their HTML structure in the future, so this software will break. Fixing it is easy---if you have the source code and access to the server. I tend to pick systems that I think might work for a long time, so this is not optimal.
Other than that, I personally wouldn't like to use LinkedIn as my priamry data repository. They're a company and not even the most friendly company at that, so who knows what will happen in five years.
As a general feedback: I'm a bit cautious about using third party Chrome extensions. I'm more OK with giving auth to my LinkedIn account. Maybe a server side option with headless chrome would be a good addition.
What is it about third-party extensions you don't like?
I know many extensions have full access to any site you visit, but I specified LinkedIn for mine, so when you install it, you are warned that it can access all your data on LinkedIn, but no other sites.
On Chrome extensions, minor bugs (or minor bugs in the libraries you depend on) might end up having far worse consequences. Read/write access to only linkedin.com can still leak a decent amount of unwanted information in case there's an exploit.
I don't use any external libraries, I wrote all of the code in the extension, and the only external requests made outside of the extension are to Google Fonts, so I wonder if it'd be possible to infect this extension.
I highly recommend that you build out more boring themes. Software engineers need resumes too, and interesting looking ones are treated as an expression of creativity. But target demographic for chrome extensions is not on HN, where people care about their privacy, know of a 1000 different ways to abuse trust online, and are capable of creating a custom LaTeX resume if they have to.
People in, say, finance would love to have an easy tool that generates a resume that looks like a banking resume. Your fancy templates are worthless to them - they do not conform to industry standard. I'm sure a lot of other professions have the same culture and you should do some research in this direction.
I just started sharing this around publicly today. I haven't been working on it for long, and just finished working out some major bugs on it last night. I wanted to know if this was something people liked and would use before spending a ton of time making themes.
The themes I have now are basically just general themes with no specific profession/purpose in mind. But yeah, I'll definitely be adding more themes in the coming days, some of which will be tailored to different professions.
Having the export in latex would be great, my cv is a subset of my linkedin profile, it would be fast to comment out unnecessary sections and re-render the pdf.
Does LinkedIn have a different policy regarding scraping LinkedIn pages if you are an extension vs. a crawler? I read recently that LinkedIn is fighting tooth and nail to prevent crawlers from scraping their content.
k. Develop, support or use software, devices, scripts, robots, or any other means or processes (including crawlers, browser plugins and add-ons, or any other technology or manual work) to scrape the Services or otherwise copy profiles and other data from the Services;
This could lead to users of the plugin being banned. Have seen this happening to recruiters who were using some extensions extensively and then somehow Linkedin decided to lock them out, which is quite a bad thing to happen to a recruiter.
The European Union also has a CV Format, already translated in the 25 (?) European Languages. You first have to enter your resume once (I mainly copy the information I already update on LinkedIn) https://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/editors/de/cv/compose and then you get a PDF+XML document which you can send to companies or re-upload to the EU website in order to update it. It's very handy and would be surely easy to adapt.
There is nothing wrong with Europass CV. In EU one cannot go wrong with it, although it's terribly space inefficient. Check available LaTeX Europass CV templates on the web/github. Using interchangeably clean, academic-style LaTeX template and Europass CV LaTeX template haven't noticed any difference in response rates.
Can this be done without the extension? In other words, could the code run as a js file in web page where the user grabs their own data and then sends that data to the 3rd party server? If so you've got a great workaround to LinkedIns one sided restrictions on stopping scrapers.
For some reason, it won't show my first job. Console reports this error:
clean.js:53 No Volunteering
clean.js:65 No Languages
clean.js:111 Removing last job.
9q4fcy0u894wfpt4om65ddw5d:1332 Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'contains' of null
at s.onWindowClick (ecqz9oxm6n7j7lgxh46b6hgxw:2735)
at p.run (37faxrlgmrjbfus14qcvdqns0:3786)
at p.join (37faxrlgmrjbfus14qcvdqns0:3788)
at Function.u.join (37faxrlgmrjbfus14qcvdqns0:6776)
at 37faxrlgmrjbfus14qcvdqns0:6779
Also, if you continue development do please consider a nice way to parse projects! As a programmer, I have plenty of those with outbound URLs.
All in all, good work, will definitely use this once I apply for a job!
Hmm. Strange error. That Uncaught TypeError is unrelated. That happens when you click any element on the page because I removed a ton of the LinkedIn code and haven't been able to figure out where that's coming from yet, but it shouldn't affect how it works.
How many jobs do you have on your profile? Is it only not showing the first (newest/current) job? Or is it not showing your first job as in first on your profile (oldest)?
When it loads, it places everything onto the resume, then checks the height to make sure it'll fit on a single page, and if it doesn't fit, it removes items until it does fit.
So it looks to me like it removed your oldest job on your profile to get it to fit. I'm planning on making it more customizable - let people choose which items to remove to make it fit.
But also yes! I too have a bunch of projects I usually include on my resume, so I will definitely work on grabbing projects and getting them onto the resume.
94 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] thread.doc/.docx are mandatory for me to look at any resume generator.
But good idea to let people know. I'll add it to the landing page.
But .odt is much easier.
Just saying. Some people are fine with this. I personally don't trust any recruiter that won't happily accept a PDF or at least tell me why they want the resume changed.
The idea behind it is that platforms should provide you with an option to export your data so that you could easily import it to a competing service if you have a desire to do so.
With that said, I signed into my LinkedIn account for the first time in about a year and saw the option to download my data already in my account settings: https://i.imgur.com/bOLqwoJ.png
It's a shame that LinkedIn/Viadeo don't have builtin import/export to this format.
The new regulation updates that existing right to specify that the data should be provided in a "structured, commonly used and machine-readable format".
https://www.eugdpr.org/
https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/01/linkedin-is-quietly-retiri...
There's a nice polyfill by Mozilla so you can use their promise interface in Chrome but it was missing some important apis last I checked (sessions and optional permissions). https://github.com/mozilla/webextension-polyfill
The most important part of my resume is the top third of the first page that lists skills, technologies, and finance specific information that allow a recruiter or target person to easily see I do and get a feeling for my career path without having to go into the job specific details yet. I don't really see a way to do something like that.
In the past I’ve used high dpi screenshots and way too much time in photoshop to edit my LinkedIn page into a printable format that feels just like LinkedIn but doesn’t have all the extraneous crap around it you get on an actual printout.
People have responded super well to that approach when I’ve handed it out in meetings. All the LinkedIn chrome makes it feel very easy and familiar and authoritatively correct to them.
Any chance you could do a theme that’s as close to pure LinkedIn as possible? I basically want the print template that LinkedIn’s site should have rather than the one it does have.
>No. The information on your LinkedIn profile never leaves LinkedIn - except for your email address, which I am saving to use with some features in the future. I won't sell it, and I won't annoy you with pointless emails.
I think it's important to state this on the front page, particularly by the "No strings attached" section. Many would consider collecting their email an "attached string".
Otherwise, I think this is great -- looking forward to more updates!
When I initially put the home page up, I wasn't collecting anything.
But I also don't want to just slap something on the home page saying that I collect emails - there's not really any place for it to fit in the design.
I do have it clearly on the TOS and FAQ pages though. I changed the wording on the homepage so people wouldn't think I'm not collecting anything.
Its a solution looking for a problem.
A lot of these comments seem pretty dubious too.
I however, have been grandfathered in to the original price and keep all the original feature set. However, if I quit or cancel my subscription or there is a lapse in payment I lose this benefit forever.
It's scummy as fuck. Designed purposely so I never let go.
If you cancel you're not an active user anymore :)
They supposedly have 128 m accounts in the US, and there are circa 150 m total people employed here. Even assuming account inflation, I'm sure the majority of professionals have accounts. Certainly when I'm screening resumes, it's very rare for a person not to be on LinkedIn. They've been going since 2002 and are a profitable business that sold for $26 bn. This should be a sign to you that even if it's not your thing, somebody's getting value.
Paper resumes were a giant pain in the ass. LinkedIn is a pretty obvious solution to the problems with paper resumes, including that they are hard to write, a pain to update, hard to format, impossible to search, and impossible to use in aggregate. This is obviously great for people hiring, but also great for those seeking employment. During a job search, LinkedIn lets you ask questions like, "Who do I know who works at company X? Who do I know who can introduce me to somebody at company X? Who used to work at Company X so I can get the unvarnished truth about what it's like to work there?" Try that with paper resumes.
TL;DR: People use it because it makes finding jobs and/or employees easier than what went before it. Lots of people.
It looks like it's trying to read that and can't find it.
I'll have to fix that.
Do you have any future plans to allow customizable resume templates?
As a consultant I'd love to have an easy customized theme, where I can pick a font, colors and upload logo. Would probably pay one time fee to get started and maybe a small fee to update an existing with new info? Or a fee per sent resume? The time this would save would be so worth it.
PS. Love the design. DS.
This extension is basically the start of a recreation of ineedaresu.me. I'll be working on a full resume generator next that doesn't rely on LinkedIn.
But I've done something similar in the past. I made the site ineedaresu.me, and have since made a few custom resume generators for different schools and organizations, styled how they like it, with custom fields, etc.
Let me ask, aren't you afraid of this: If you get big enough, Linkedin will fiddle with their HTML and your app won't work anymore, right?
So to get the person's name, it just looks for h1.pv-top-card-section__name and grabs that.
As long as what I need is available and visible on the page, I should be able to grab it.
The next thing I'm working on is something similar to ineedaresu.me (a project I made a few years ago) - but with a ton of improvements and better themes and customization options. It'll work the same as this extension, but it won't rely on LinkedIn - you'll have to enter the content yourself.
Still, the geek in me is a bit unhappy. LinkedIn will change their HTML structure in the future, so this software will break. Fixing it is easy---if you have the source code and access to the server. I tend to pick systems that I think might work for a long time, so this is not optimal.
Other than that, I personally wouldn't like to use LinkedIn as my priamry data repository. They're a company and not even the most friendly company at that, so who knows what will happen in five years.
As a general feedback: I'm a bit cautious about using third party Chrome extensions. I'm more OK with giving auth to my LinkedIn account. Maybe a server side option with headless chrome would be a good addition.
I know many extensions have full access to any site you visit, but I specified LinkedIn for mine, so when you install it, you are warned that it can access all your data on LinkedIn, but no other sites.
https://www.wired.com/story/chrome-extension-malware/
edit: tried your extension out and I really liked it! thanks for sharing
On Chrome extensions, minor bugs (or minor bugs in the libraries you depend on) might end up having far worse consequences. Read/write access to only linkedin.com can still leak a decent amount of unwanted information in case there's an exploit.
I don't use any external libraries, I wrote all of the code in the extension, and the only external requests made outside of the extension are to Google Fonts, so I wonder if it'd be possible to infect this extension.
People in, say, finance would love to have an easy tool that generates a resume that looks like a banking resume. Your fancy templates are worthless to them - they do not conform to industry standard. I'm sure a lot of other professions have the same culture and you should do some research in this direction.
Otherwise, great product! Wish you best of luck.
I just started sharing this around publicly today. I haven't been working on it for long, and just finished working out some major bugs on it last night. I wanted to know if this was something people liked and would use before spending a ton of time making themes.
The themes I have now are basically just general themes with no specific profession/purpose in mind. But yeah, I'll definitely be adding more themes in the coming days, some of which will be tailored to different professions.
Having the export in latex would be great, my cv is a subset of my linkedin profile, it would be fast to comment out unnecessary sections and re-render the pdf.
Just curious.
EDIT: Found this on the user agreement
https://www.linkedin.com/legal/user-agreement
k. Develop, support or use software, devices, scripts, robots, or any other means or processes (including crawlers, browser plugins and add-ons, or any other technology or manual work) to scrape the Services or otherwise copy profiles and other data from the Services;
Now if we can only get rid of the 'fill your resume via our outdated ill-designed online form' anti-pattern that's still common in many industries...
But I agree!
I (used to at least) let me import data from LinkedIn and use it to create a custom cv.
I actually decided to get away from all frameworks for the landing page. It's just simple HTML, Javascript/jQuery, and CSS/LESS.
All in all, good work, will definitely use this once I apply for a job!
How many jobs do you have on your profile? Is it only not showing the first (newest/current) job? Or is it not showing your first job as in first on your profile (oldest)?
When it loads, it places everything onto the resume, then checks the height to make sure it'll fit on a single page, and if it doesn't fit, it removes items until it does fit.
So it looks to me like it removed your oldest job on your profile to get it to fit. I'm planning on making it more customizable - let people choose which items to remove to make it fit.
But also yes! I too have a bunch of projects I usually include on my resume, so I will definitely work on grabbing projects and getting them onto the resume.