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Show HN: Nectr–trying to kill the résumé over here

4 points by matthewmcneely ↗ HN
Hi HN, I'm Matthew from Nectr (https://nectr.network). Nectr is a service that lets IT professionals easily create a free, sharable profile that accurately captures your skills, experience and availability. With this functionality "in the can", we're in midst of extending our service to let you create a genuine, uncontrived network of colleagues that you've actually worked with and who can accurately confirm your skills and experience. These confirmations will form the edges in our graph that comprise your first degree network.

As a long time freelancer, I started working on Nectr to fill a requirement that I've long had: ditching my Word-formatted résumé for good—and automatically answering the oft-asked question: "Are you available?". Existing options (LinkedIn, StackOverflow, JSON resume, etc.) just don't fit the bill.

How is Nectr different than the alternatives?

- Your profile (example here: https://nectr.pub/12507/matthew.mcneely) is completely open—the viewer does not need to have an account on Nectr. You can also append .json to the end of your profile URL to get a machine-friendly version. The ability to maintain your profile will always be free.

- Your skills and platform knowledge are bound to entries in our knowledge graph of IT skills and platforms. This has (obvious?) advantages over the simple keyword tags used in most other services.

- Our concept of availability is extremely granular. For instance, you can set an availability for a certain rate, or engagement type or zip code. In other words, we know that availability isn't binary. Further, we know that people can have multiple availabilities. For example, you might be willing to work on freelance crypto projects up to 10 hours a week after hours, but also might be open to a full time job close to your home.

- If you hate our UI (hey, we get it), we'll soon open up our GraphQL API so you can maintain your profile programmatically.

We're currently in preview release (aka unfunded!), so we're limiting the number of accounts while we work out the kinks. If you're an IT professional and this sounds like something you'd be down for, you can sign up here: https://nectr.network

7 comments

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theamk
Interesting, the "json resume" part reminded me of the previous related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29960279

I agree with the top comment that automated matching is a bad fit for regular hiring.. but I don't know much about freelancing, so maybe it's a better fit there.

gregjor
Freelancing has a lot more sales and personal relationships and less keyword matching.

Gig work markets such as Upwork and Fiverr target mainly the low end of the freelancing market. Companies looking for freelancers can post there too.

I have freelanced for over a decade, getting work by word of both, referrals, and through an agency. I haven’t used a resume, or been asked for one, in all that time, nor have I been matched through a web site.

matthewmcneely
I get a dozen or so emails weekly from recruiters asking if I'm available. Often, it's clear that the sender has no idea about my background and is just using what I call a "spray and pray" strategy for finding candidates for their job.

I have a Gmail filter in place that looks for keywords in incoming mail ("urgent requirement", "formatted resume", etc) and sends a canned response which includes my Nectr profile. In my profile they can see if I'm available, my rate, whether my skills are really a fit for their position.

quickthrower2
Thanks.

I had an idea that a goos way to deal with resumes is to have a big personal organised data bank and generate job-application specific resumes from it. For example I might want to highlight or hide team leading experience based on the application.

I like what you are doing. I think resumes will be a reality for a while, but I see them as a transient throwaway missive, not a representation of me. So a way of talking 10mb of data about me and producing a 50kb resume per job is ideal. Eventually that will be all done in json of course.

matthewmcneely
That's interesting. Note that with Nectr the way it stands, you could do all of this. Just append .json to your public profile link and you get your profile in JSON. You can transform it anyway you like.

I'm planning on opening up our GraphQL API to profile owners too, so that you could edit your profile programmatically.