Emory, my cofounder, designed the website and a few of the resumes. We contracted with some really talented designers regionally and around the country for the rest of the resumes. We didn't want to have the same look and feel for all of them so we plan to continue to use a variety of great designers.
How did you go about finding these designers? I've had some success finding correct designers on odesk, but it can be quite hard and time-consuming to find a good fit (and it really depends on your budget, in your case you can afford to hire expensive top-notch designers I guess).
We have graphic artists that custom typeset the resumes manually. There are 2 revision rounds included in each purchase (additional revisions/edits/versions can be purchased) so there's back and forth with our artists.
You should mention his on your homepage. I assumed that the $99 got me a fill-in-the-blank Word template. Having a designer do the heavy lifting and polish sounds much more appealing. You could also easily upsell to editing and review too.
Love the idea, and your products look amazing. I've definitely got the site bookmarked if (when?) I ever need to hit the job market again.
My only concern with these types of resumes is that I've heard stuff like this can't be read by automated resume parsers used by some companies. I don't know how true that really is, does anyone know?
Do you really want to work for a company that uses automated resume parsers?
I would understand if they asked for one of the various specialized XML dialects out there (HR-XML, XMLResume etc), but in my (limited) experience, nobody does.
That's certainly been brought up to us before. We've run our resumes through parsing software and they've actually performed well. We don't advertise that because we haven't run every resume through every parser, so we can't say that they perform as well as Text files. Our advice for folks who are submitting to places where resume parsing software may be used is that they have a text version of their resume on hand as well and then use the Loft Resume for interviews and emails.
Most statistics show that 70% of jobs are found through personal networking, while 30% are found through career boards (like Monster.com.) We feel like we fit well with those 70%. However, even within the 30% of jobs that are found through career boards, most of those end in an email and an interview. We think a Loft Resume is a great way to stand out when job candidates do land that interview.
The site design itself is really beautiful too. Loft Resumes isn't the only case where I've heard projects getting a lot of useful traffic from CSS galleries.
While in my case (Candy Japan) I'm not sure if the possible improvement in conversions would justify spending money on the design, I wonder if the side benefit of getting listed in CSS galleries would make it worth it.
We actually haven't gotten many orders directly from the CSS galleries. While some designers do order our resumes, they aren't our primary target market (many of them will design their own.)
From our standpoint, it helps out with getting some solid back links for SEO purposes in the beginning and also helps from a referral standpoint. We also just like seeing and spreading great design. We're kind of passionate about that. Some designers will send the link to their non-designer friends because they don't feel like doing it pro-bono for their friend and the money their friend can pay just isn't worth it to create something from scratch.
However, if you have a product or service whose direct customer is designers, then you might be able to get some conversions from the CSS galleries. Your's could be this case.
We just launched about a month ago and have been doing our best to keep up with orders so haven't had time to do proper surveys. That's certainly something that we want to do in the near future. I think it would really help from a marketing perspective - having some great success stories. I actually got the idea for the business because a friend of mine hired a graphic artist to design his resume and he ended up getting a ton of call and interest - many of them saying that they were impressed with his designed resume.
Hey just a free idea if anyone want to build it, I think a web app that generated stylish resumes automatically from your LinkedIn profile would be great. It could make watermarked ones for free preview and then charge you a few bucks if you wanted to download a real one.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard "Well, my resume's a bit out of date, but here's my linkedin.."
Just because someone has an idea before you doesn't mean your idea is not worth pursuing. Execution is sometimes more important than being big or first.
Make it automated and mobile: build a beautiful CV from an iPhone app, pay via in-app purchase and get 5 physical printouts delivered (also PDF in email and HTML version hosted for sharing).
1. You're a geek, you prefer computers. Random people who need help with CVs don't see it that way. They take whatever they find.
2. They find the app because it's cool to try and use. Websites are boring and obstruct. Apps generate huge traction way faster. The in-app payments are also easier for users, no credit card forms.
3. Smartphones outsell computers by 20% every day.
4. Once you find a way to make the interface great on a phone, you can deliver to tablets easily.
I think a CV is something you have more investment in; I don't think as many people would be searching on their phones for an app... especially as writing a CV generally happens on a PC.
You're more likely to be sitting in front of a word processor bleakly wondering how to prep it up - and go do some Googling for CV tips...
What's more likely - that you go to a resume builder website when your mate recommends, or download an app? What would you recommend - a cool app, or a website?
Apps are physical and cool. CVs should be fun to do. That's the future. Assuming that the desktop is a primary device for people in 2012 is just wrong. Also, CVs don't need to contain huge amounts of text; better keep it simple.
Probably the website since it's more useful for the task. Plus apps aren't cool or physical (unless you mean the touching your phone part). I could see the word-of-mouth factor being higher for an app, but the app would have to work very well for the task and I don't think that's something that would be easy to achieve with the form factor and the fact that most devices deny you a physical keyboard. So maybe something that only requires light editing and pulls most of the data from outside sources?
I see your technical point of view, but the average user market shows something else. People couldn't imagine doing stuff they do on a phone before iPhone. Now they do all sorts of mass content creation and they prefer it.
UI is just a matter of how much energy you put into it. It's not easy, but can be done. See iMovie, mobile bitmap editors, Garage Band... Difficult and unbelievable 5 years ago, but clearly doable.
You're right about apps being popular and continually growing in importance.
However, you're talking about a task (creating/updating a CV) that takes a lot of manual work and editing. It could certainly be automated to a large extent by grabbing existing information from LinkedIn or Facebook or wherever. But when you get down to the details, there's a lot to write. That will never be fun to do in an app.
I can't imagine people caring how "fun" a CV app/website is so long as it helps them get the resume updated and get a new job.
The templates look great, congrats on the success. How did you arrive at the $99 price point?
Also: the submission title implies the project earned $10k in a month, but I didn't see that in the blog post itself. Where did that number come from? Is it accurate?
I'd be really interested to see how you phrased the emails you sent out to the bloggers to get them to write about you, and what your success rate was.
Congratulations on the launch and the beautiful work you're producing. I'd love to hear your feedback on the very popular discussion from a few days ago here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804134) on Raganwald's blog, "I don't hire unlucky people" (http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-dont-hire-unlucky-people) .
Specifically, I'm curious as to how much you as the creator of this service think making a resume standout really helps an applicant compared to a bland resume from a measurably more qualified candidate? Thanks!
A snippet from the blog...
---
“First, I stopped caring so much about little things like how 'professionally' a resume was formatted or whether the cover email had spelling mistakes. I realized that throwing people away because of a spelling mistakes was really another way of discarding half the resumés because you don’t want to work with unlucky people.”
“Wait,” said Oscar, “but surely all things being equal, the person who takes the time to get the email right is better than the person who doesn’t?”
“Sure,” agreed Ernestine, “But all other things aren’t equal. What if the email with the spelling mistake came from someone who’s really busy because they’re talented and have a lot to do in their current position?”
---
I read that post on Raganwald's blog the other day. I think there's a difference in having a "professional" resume format in standard Word document black and white and having a resume that's been designed by an artist. My guess is that in that story, Ernestine would at least give a Loft Resume a good look - sometimes that little bit is enough - you've stood out and gotten noticed. That can be half the battle if an employer is looking through hundreds of resumes.
In my experience clean/light CV's are by far the best for almost every job - particularly engineering jobs. The exception being designers.
What sort of CV's are you seeing come in?
I know quite a few HR types who will find a snazzy looking CV and instantly demote it, on the basis that the sizzle is probably hiding some inadequacy (this is not necessarily a bad marker in my experience).
It would be interesting to see if the investment in this pays off for the candidate - whether the really high quality of the design flips it over that danger marker.
We've been surprised at the variety of professions coming in. There haven't been any real trends yet - we've had everything from CFOs to college students to marketers to folks in the legal field. We originally thought we'd see mostly careers that had an appreciation for design but where the job seeker wasn't necessarily a designer (like photographers or people in the music industry) as well as marketers. I guess that goes to show you don't always know your customer until you start selling
I'm not surprised you aren't seeing design types. A prebuilt template for that kind of position would be and instant red flag. Not to mention a merely "pretty" resume template would look bland amongst bespoke, polished portfolios and resumes.
Interestingy filtering results like that is the complete opposite of what the recent "I don't hire unlucky people." post suggested (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804134).
This is also the stuff that gives job seekers nightmares. The whole process is already a black box and knowing that some (or all?) employers penalize resumes that are trying too hard just adds more noise to the many conflicting pieces of information candidates have to consider.
I read that post with interest. It certainly makes some good points. the typo example, certainly.
However; in my experience, certain things do automatically mark out a cv as a poor fit - one of which is "too flashy". This is born out of originally giving everyone a read/shot and finding the flashy ones were, every time, not so good.
I dont agree it is a black box btw; if you do a little googling the advice is fairly standard - keep it to 2 pages, keep it clean and readable, 12pt font.
The idea of fitting a standard model is a good one; making the recruiters life easy is a good thing, and a different looking CV can interrupt your workflow.
I was curious about this. As a student who will be applying for an engineering job one day, I'm not sure what the rules are when it comes to resumes, but I had a feeling that flashy was not the way to go.
That said, some of these look really good. My favorites are the Stars and the Shearling Point options, both of which are just subtle enough for my tastes. Best of luck to Mr. Caldwell in his future endeavors.
From what I've heard from my recruiter friends, you want to prioritize flow, readability, and scan-ability over flashy.
Recruiters are often at-times swamped with thousands of resumes (and even more at big companies). They'll spend at most 5 minutes scanning your resume to see if you are a good fit.
The resumes are very attractive. However, in my experience looking at resumes I put 0-1% of the weight on attractiveness. Maybe it's more useful for other fields, however.
I could see such a resume getting a positive response in design related professions, but in my field (biotech), it would get a negative response. The immediate thought would be "why??"
- I can really see this type of service blowing up, once you find the right product/market/fit.
- The slider above-the-fold on the 'shop' tab distracts me from the rest of the page. It wasn't intuitive to me that I could scroll down to begin shopping.
- A simple filter would be a great addition to the 'shop' page. It'd be nice to filter by type (e.g business, creative, etc.), price or design (rustic, elegant)
- I wonder if you would see more sales if you tried a/b testing your pricing model a bit. Is there a reason why you charge the extra $5.00 for edits? If the shopper pays $99 to own the theme, shouldn't he be entitled to edit it as much as he pleases?
- You're looking for resume writers. Have you connected with Hagan Blount? I believe he designs Infographic resumes. (http://haganblount.com/resume). Some of your designs require users to highlight a quote, etc., and I wonder if they could use help writing out these areas.
- Any suggestions on how to make it intuitive to scroll down?
- We've thought about filtering but we've honestly seen no trends in which professions pick which designs - it's been all over the board.
- The shopper doesn't own the theme. Due to the copyright agreements that we have with the designers who created the resumes and the font foundries who created the typefaces, we aren't able to release the source files to be edited. Also, most folks don't have or can't use inDesign, which is what we use to typeset the resumes. We've tried to keep the price of edits low at $5 as a service to our customers because in early testing, we came across this as an objection. People need to revise their resumes or have different versions. We wanted to reduce friction there. We obviously don't make money on this but we just think it makes good business sense and is good customer service.
- We don't want to get into writing resumes. Instead, we'd rather partner with resume writers. They have a captive audience that's shown they're willing to pay for resume services. We'd rather get referrals from them than compete with them.
re: suggestions on how to make it intuitive to scroll down:
On the shop page: An anchor link that sits above-the-fold with a call-to-action like "start shopping" or "browse designs" would probably make it more intuitive. Anything that shows me a peak of what's below-the-fold would help.
Since the main slider occupies all of the above-the-fold real estate and has its own horizontal navigation, I just assumed I was 'done' with the page once I had scrolled through each slide.
I'll comment with another note, I love that this is coming out of Greenville. I live here and have traveled to Boston, SF, Seattle, DC and others but Greenville is up and coming. It's not too big but not too small. It's still small enough to have a piece of the intimate south, but big enough to feel a great part of the vibrant city.
It's also dirt cheap to live here compared to somewhere else. A 2-3 bedroom apartment for downtown in the heart of everything will run less than 2k if you find a good spot. Also access to CoWork is awesome like the OP was saying. You can find out more about Greenville here, http://thenextbig.co/. All this to say, if you want to kind of step out of the norm a bit and experience something different but not leaving great talent Greenville is an awesome place to be.
> It's also dirt cheap to live here compared to somewhere else. A 2-3 bedroom apartment for downtown in the heart of everything will run less than 2k if you find a good spot.
As an NYC resident who lives in Chelsea, I wept when I read this.
It would have been great to have some retargeting advertising going the whole time. It can be very cheap and makes people on average 70% more likely to convert.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadGood Luck.
My only concern with these types of resumes is that I've heard stuff like this can't be read by automated resume parsers used by some companies. I don't know how true that really is, does anyone know?
I would understand if they asked for one of the various specialized XML dialects out there (HR-XML, XMLResume etc), but in my (limited) experience, nobody does.
Most statistics show that 70% of jobs are found through personal networking, while 30% are found through career boards (like Monster.com.) We feel like we fit well with those 70%. However, even within the 30% of jobs that are found through career boards, most of those end in an email and an interview. We think a Loft Resume is a great way to stand out when job candidates do land that interview.
While in my case (Candy Japan) I'm not sure if the possible improvement in conversions would justify spending money on the design, I wonder if the side benefit of getting listed in CSS galleries would make it worth it.
From our standpoint, it helps out with getting some solid back links for SEO purposes in the beginning and also helps from a referral standpoint. We also just like seeing and spreading great design. We're kind of passionate about that. Some designers will send the link to their non-designer friends because they don't feel like doing it pro-bono for their friend and the money their friend can pay just isn't worth it to create something from scratch.
However, if you have a product or service whose direct customer is designers, then you might be able to get some conversions from the CSS galleries. Your's could be this case.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard "Well, my resume's a bit out of date, but here's my linkedin.."
Also, if you are LinkedIn, you could do this.
I think they already do?
http://resume.linkedinlabs.com
Unfortunately, I don't have the same talent for design.
from linked in: http://resume.linkedinlabs.com/
There is another service (3rd party) that does this, but I can't recall the URL...
http://sampleresumetemplate.net/
I think your designs are beautiful, and you're definitely fulfilling a need. I'll be sending a link to those who I know are looking for a job.
Your sales will jump from $10,000 to $100,000.
2. They find the app because it's cool to try and use. Websites are boring and obstruct. Apps generate huge traction way faster. The in-app payments are also easier for users, no credit card forms.
3. Smartphones outsell computers by 20% every day.
4. Once you find a way to make the interface great on a phone, you can deliver to tablets easily.
Build future now. Change the pain to fun.
You're more likely to be sitting in front of a word processor bleakly wondering how to prep it up - and go do some Googling for CV tips...
Apps are physical and cool. CVs should be fun to do. That's the future. Assuming that the desktop is a primary device for people in 2012 is just wrong. Also, CVs don't need to contain huge amounts of text; better keep it simple.
UI is just a matter of how much energy you put into it. It's not easy, but can be done. See iMovie, mobile bitmap editors, Garage Band... Difficult and unbelievable 5 years ago, but clearly doable.
If not phones, then at least tablets.
I do admit that I am a post-pc era freak though.
However, you're talking about a task (creating/updating a CV) that takes a lot of manual work and editing. It could certainly be automated to a large extent by grabbing existing information from LinkedIn or Facebook or wherever. But when you get down to the details, there's a lot to write. That will never be fun to do in an app.
I can't imagine people caring how "fun" a CV app/website is so long as it helps them get the resume updated and get a new job.
Look around, millions of people grab 1080p and cut on a pocket device. Not just that, much more.
I was suggesting to be creative and think ahead. I am biased, but I believe it would work great and bring revenue to the table fast.
Also: the submission title implies the project earned $10k in a month, but I didn't see that in the blog post itself. Where did that number come from? Is it accurate?
I'd be really interested to see how you phrased the emails you sent out to the bloggers to get them to write about you, and what your success rate was.
A snippet from the blog... --- “First, I stopped caring so much about little things like how 'professionally' a resume was formatted or whether the cover email had spelling mistakes. I realized that throwing people away because of a spelling mistakes was really another way of discarding half the resumés because you don’t want to work with unlucky people.”
“Wait,” said Oscar, “but surely all things being equal, the person who takes the time to get the email right is better than the person who doesn’t?”
“Sure,” agreed Ernestine, “But all other things aren’t equal. What if the email with the spelling mistake came from someone who’s really busy because they’re talented and have a lot to do in their current position?” ---
In my experience clean/light CV's are by far the best for almost every job - particularly engineering jobs. The exception being designers.
What sort of CV's are you seeing come in?
I know quite a few HR types who will find a snazzy looking CV and instantly demote it, on the basis that the sizzle is probably hiding some inadequacy (this is not necessarily a bad marker in my experience).
It would be interesting to see if the investment in this pays off for the candidate - whether the really high quality of the design flips it over that danger marker.
This is also the stuff that gives job seekers nightmares. The whole process is already a black box and knowing that some (or all?) employers penalize resumes that are trying too hard just adds more noise to the many conflicting pieces of information candidates have to consider.
However; in my experience, certain things do automatically mark out a cv as a poor fit - one of which is "too flashy". This is born out of originally giving everyone a read/shot and finding the flashy ones were, every time, not so good.
I dont agree it is a black box btw; if you do a little googling the advice is fairly standard - keep it to 2 pages, keep it clean and readable, 12pt font.
The idea of fitting a standard model is a good one; making the recruiters life easy is a good thing, and a different looking CV can interrupt your workflow.
That said, some of these look really good. My favorites are the Stars and the Shearling Point options, both of which are just subtle enough for my tastes. Best of luck to Mr. Caldwell in his future endeavors.
Recruiters are often at-times swamped with thousands of resumes (and even more at big companies). They'll spend at most 5 minutes scanning your resume to see if you are a good fit.
- The slider above-the-fold on the 'shop' tab distracts me from the rest of the page. It wasn't intuitive to me that I could scroll down to begin shopping.
- A simple filter would be a great addition to the 'shop' page. It'd be nice to filter by type (e.g business, creative, etc.), price or design (rustic, elegant)
- I wonder if you would see more sales if you tried a/b testing your pricing model a bit. Is there a reason why you charge the extra $5.00 for edits? If the shopper pays $99 to own the theme, shouldn't he be entitled to edit it as much as he pleases?
- You're looking for resume writers. Have you connected with Hagan Blount? I believe he designs Infographic resumes. (http://haganblount.com/resume). Some of your designs require users to highlight a quote, etc., and I wonder if they could use help writing out these areas.
- Any suggestions on how to make it intuitive to scroll down?
- We've thought about filtering but we've honestly seen no trends in which professions pick which designs - it's been all over the board.
- The shopper doesn't own the theme. Due to the copyright agreements that we have with the designers who created the resumes and the font foundries who created the typefaces, we aren't able to release the source files to be edited. Also, most folks don't have or can't use inDesign, which is what we use to typeset the resumes. We've tried to keep the price of edits low at $5 as a service to our customers because in early testing, we came across this as an objection. People need to revise their resumes or have different versions. We wanted to reduce friction there. We obviously don't make money on this but we just think it makes good business sense and is good customer service.
- We don't want to get into writing resumes. Instead, we'd rather partner with resume writers. They have a captive audience that's shown they're willing to pay for resume services. We'd rather get referrals from them than compete with them.
On the shop page: An anchor link that sits above-the-fold with a call-to-action like "start shopping" or "browse designs" would probably make it more intuitive. Anything that shows me a peak of what's below-the-fold would help.
Since the main slider occupies all of the above-the-fold real estate and has its own horizontal navigation, I just assumed I was 'done' with the page once I had scrolled through each slide.
It's also dirt cheap to live here compared to somewhere else. A 2-3 bedroom apartment for downtown in the heart of everything will run less than 2k if you find a good spot. Also access to CoWork is awesome like the OP was saying. You can find out more about Greenville here, http://thenextbig.co/. All this to say, if you want to kind of step out of the norm a bit and experience something different but not leaving great talent Greenville is an awesome place to be.
As an NYC resident who lives in Chelsea, I wept when I read this.
Any plans to code them and let people generate mini-sites from them? I could see that doing pretty well too.
In any case the service and site looks great, congratulations!