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

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1) Provide the information exactly as the person has written it 2) Make it easy for you to incrementally add little bits about your career as you think of them or as they come in

Questions you get asked can be seen by you and you can quick add a Snippet to your interactive profile which it'll then use to answer future related questions. I.e. Over time, it gets more and more complete.

Eventually, I want to build an export tool that takes a job description, looks through your history, and generates the right resume for that job.

This is a no-code solution, all in the browser. You don't need to mess with training data, training times, or anything. It's just: Import resume/blog posts/autobiography/whatever, generate Snippets, add more detail and Snippets as you see fit, get asked questions, rinse and repeat.

Edit: Posted an image of the building interface as it is today.

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.

I can imagine this being a way to pre-warm any cold interactions I might have with new people I meet at work, conferences, etc. More importantly, as something that helps people remember who I am because you know, why network or meet people if they just forget you.

Any time the resume actually matters (i.e it’s not just a formality during a personal reference application), resumes that are formatted in a standard and machine readable way, don’t use columns, don’t rely on graphics, and hit on the required keywords that match up in ATS systems that’s matching against the job description are going to immediately filter to the top. After that, font sizes and formatting choices that make your resume human scannable and easily referenced help. Even giving your screener margins and space in your resume to write notes or annotate your resume can help a lot. The “in your own words” then finally comes into play once somebody actually reads it after it’s passed 5 prior filtering events.

Playing the game matters a lot when you’re competing with hundreds of other resumes, recruiters and hiring managers are going to spend a few seconds on each one before rejecting it 90% of the time. Getting your resume read is the real challenge.

So I decided to build something that is useful to a single person first, the person that wants to market themselves. This is the first iteration that seems to be working for me in that regard; as a depth first tool.

This is intended as a 'show and tell and get feedback post', but if any of you want to actually try making one, you can reach out to me at anyeung@protoconstruct.com.

I'm intent on making networking just less painful for everyone, in particular, for the individual. If this gets big enough, then I'll think about breadth first tools.

This is partly why I show the source Snippets (Q/A Pairs written directly by the owner) below the summary as a way to verify the information. Kind of like the AI 'showing it's work. It also let's see more about the owner which is a nice side benefit, or maybe the main benefit.

I can also turn off the AI summary part and leave the AI search part. If this becomes a bigger thing, I might give users a way to enable/disable the potentially hallucinogenic part, but it'll be their choice.

I think there's a lot of work to do to work out the kinks with things like hallucinations, but I think we forget sometimes so much of what we do is statistical in nature already. Your car has a statistical chance of breaking down within x timeframe and while you're on the highway, it's just, low enough that you don't worry about it. I think AI will be a similar thing where we have to get comfortable with how we evaluate and mitigate risks, but like many things, they'll never be 0.

I needed to balance import everything with no user input (which is prone to hallucinations and doesn't give you an idea of how the AI will answer about you) and asking the user to do too much.

I landed on a halfway point kind of like writing little blurbs about your career that you can add on incrementally. Unlike retraining an AI, you can just add incremental bits.

So the current form is import resume/blog post/etc which generates questions and answer pairs called 'Snippets'. You can add more detail since the resume is usually pretty vague, then officially add these Snippets to your AI.

Once people ask you questions, if there is an answer, it'll use those blurbs. If there is no information yet, it'll say so. You will see all the questions asked of your AI so you can incrementally add Snippets on your Monday night or whatever based on what people had asked your AI profile.

I might change it, but this seems like a good balance between automation, giving you control, and making it incrementally updatable.

Btw, it's all zero-latency, if you make a change, it basically takes immediate effect on your AI. This was an important property to me.

Resumes and cover letters are in theory basically a proof of work check to ensure you're interested enough to spend time on the application.

6hrs: 2300 questions

Originally I had mine in chat form but for various reasons, it seemed like an FAQ format with 'sources' resonated better. I could be wrong, but I think that makes OpenAI's custom GPTs an ill fit for the specific problem of networking.

Also, so far, looks like the anti-hallucination stuff is working well but let me know if you run into something unexpected.

This provides a secondary benefit of making hallucinations much much rarer. Try making it lie or make stuff up, it's pretty resilient now. If you find one, let me know; I haven't seen one in a while now thanks to y'all's redteaming.

It's a custom template unfortunately, I can change the colors but it's not modular at all (yeah I know, should have maybe started that way).

For reference, I'm using React + Typescript + Tailwind.