Maybe my mindset is too far from the startup scene to understand the appeal, but personally I would not be impressed by an applicant who uses a resume-as-a-service system. At least not any more than I would someone who copy-pastes a resume from about.com or something similar.
Initially I would have agreed with you but having graduated in the dot.com bust of 2001, I don't.
I had a hard time getting a first job, especially as I am not good at the sort of bullshit (for want of a better word) you need to put in job applications.
I treated the task as a full time job handing in many applications per week. The ones that asked for a CV were easy (but generally had a low chance of a reply). Or a CV and cover letter (similar reply rate). Then you had the corporates, who wanted an individually tailored example of when you showed leadership, or solved a difficult problem despite many setbacks. (These were a pain in the arse to fill out, but generally I got a far better response rate from these applications). I hated them. That why I studied computers and science. But for every 9 bad days where I couldn't think up anything to put as a good response top these stupid questions, I had a good day, where the "bullshit" would flow. I would come up with a good answer. Not lying, but "bigging up" what I actually had done, and making it sound good.
Once you have done 3 or 4 of those applications forms, the questions they ask aren't so different. So guess what, you can reuse the answers. OK, the answers will need tweaked, but that's what I did. I had a file where I had 20 of these questions, and looked for the most similar and tweaked it to the job description.
Now. I managed that with a text file from what I remember. Is there really a need for an app to do this?
Depends on the job, but having hired people for startups, I'm the same way. I don't want people who want a job. I want people who want this job. So the more generic the application, the more likely it is that I'll ignore it.
Basically, the harder something is marketed to me, the more I assume that the marketing is a necessary cover-up for a flawed product. There's a reason McDonald's spends circa 10% of revenues on advertising. Hint: it's not because there are a lot of people in the US who haven't heard of McDonald's yet.
> Also, polish beyond a certain level is a negative for me...Basically, the harder something is marketed to me, the more I assume that the marketing is a necessary cover-up for a flawed product.
That's an interesting comment. I understand where you're coming from to a certain extent, and I'm not going to suggest that hiring is easy, but you can only be so skeptical or cynical about candidates by nature before it starts to negatively impact your process.
I'm of the opinion that a candidate who has taken the time to put together an impressive, polished showcase of their work, where the showcase is something he or she built (not a third party SaaS service), should start out as a more appealing prospect than a candidate who isn't trying to knock your socks off.
Depends on what the candidate would be doing. If their job is building showcases, sure. Otherwise, maybe they're awesome, or maybe they're just blowing smoke.
If it's a choice between somebody who's focused on making great stuff because that's what the company needs and somebody who is crafting another showpiece for their trophy case, I'll take the one who's less excited about self-promotion. Some of the best people I've hired are terrible at marketing, so I feel like my anti-marketing bias is a way of leveling the playing field.
Thanks for the feedback! We are hoping to make it easier for people to be able to show their personality and passions and to tailor their job applications to each opportunity by making it quick and easy to create a narrative as to why they'd be great for the job, backed up with actual evidence that you can flick through, rather than just a resume-as-a-service. We see it more as cover-letter replacement than a resume replacement to that effect (the idea is you'd attach your resume to this).
"flick" makes me think you're seeing this in a mobile context.
I'd be curious to hear more on the market research you did that suggested pursuing a causal, mobile model for consumption of job applicants' materials.
We haven't decided to specifically focus on mobile, although one neat use case we had in mind was that an Accredible narrative might be a great thing to take into an in-person interview with you on a mobile or tablet and then using that to illustrate the points that you'd like to make once they ask you to elaborate on your skills, projects, experience and interest. Our primary intended use case however is more on desktop-focused job applications.
The UX refinement sessions for that tablet use case would be crazy fun. The experience would have to be silk if I were going to hinge my new-hire interview on putting it in front of an employer, with no experience on the app, and let them self-direct the exploration. I'd look forward to see how that turned out.
And my latent tech writer OCD-ness compels me to suggest dropping "flick" from your vocabulary in favor of
[...] with actual evidence that you can interact with.
Agreed, it definitely makes more sense to me if you think of it as a cover letter replacement.
I still think, however, that as a potential employer I would have a hard time getting over the bias of thinking "oh, he just used a tool to generate this." Not sure how you could escape that outside of allowing users to heavily customize the appearance and experience, as well as self-host the end product and remove any links or references back to Accredible.
