
Show HN: An extension to turn your LinkedIn into a resume - mitchas
http://ceev.io
======
chrisseldo
> _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!

~~~
ta3334445
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).

Its a solution looking for a problem.

A lot of these comments seem pretty dubious too.

~~~
matte_black
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.

~~~
lmartel
That's not the purpose of grandfathered pricing, they just want to raise
prices without upsetting active users.

If you cancel you're not an active user anymore :)

------
jimmies
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.

~~~
croshan
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.

~~~
mitchas
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.

~~~
jnordwick
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.

------
clumsysmurf
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.

~~~
titanix2
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.

~~~
icebraining
It's not ahead of time - that regulation has existed for a long time. See the
work of Max Schrems against FB, and his site on how you can get your own data:
[http://europe-v-
facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_data...](http://europe-v-
facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_data_.html)

The new regulation updates that existing right to specify that the data should
be provided in a "structured, commonly used and machine-readable format".

~~~
rising-sky
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:

[https://www.eugdpr.org/](https://www.eugdpr.org/)

------
kirillseva
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.

Otherwise, great product! Wish you best of luck.

~~~
mitchas
That's #1 on my to-do list right now.

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.

------
kinkrtyavimoodh
Great idea and perfect, to-the-point, snappy demo video!

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...

~~~
mitchas
Sorry, can't help with that ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

But I agree!

------
CalRobert
On a not dissimilar note, [https://jsonresume.org/](https://jsonresume.org/)
tackles similar problems anl could use some love.

------
palakchokshi
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.

Just curious.

EDIT: Found this on the user agreement

[https://www.linkedin.com/legal/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;

~~~
s3nnyy
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.

------
croisillon
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](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.

~~~
user5994461
Noone in Europe ever used that thing. Don't advise.

~~~
duiker101
Not only, it's also a awful format generally.

------
bacharu
Just so you know, LinkedIn released something similar:
[https://blog.linkedin.com/2018/february/7/rock-your-
resume-w...](https://blog.linkedin.com/2018/february/7/rock-your-resume-with-
resume-assistant-from-linkedin-microsoft)

~~~
shthed
This should be standard functionality built into LinkedIn, they let you export
to PDF but it sucks. Depending on office365 is scummy

------
Frye
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?

~~~
antonkm
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.

PS. Love the design. DS.

~~~
mitchas
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.

------
yodon
Great idea.

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.

~~~
mitchas
Good idea. I do want to get more themes in, and a pure LinkedIn theme would be
good to have. I'll work on it!

------
dancek
This looks really nice!

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.

~~~
nkozyra
I suspect it's also brittle if LI does any A/B testing in that regard.

------
Jhsto
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!

~~~
mitchas
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.

------
piptastic
This encounters a javascript error on my profile:

    
    
      Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'trim' of undefined
        at init.<anonymous> (inject.js:69)
        at init.<anonymous> (jquery.min.js:4)
        at l (jquery.min.js:4)
        at Object.add [as done] (jquery.min.js:4)
        at Array.<anonymous> (jquery.min.js:4)
        at Function.each (jquery.min.js:4)
        at Object.<anonymous> (jquery.min.js:4)
        at Function.Deferred (jquery.min.js:4)
        at Object.then (jquery.min.js:4)
        at init.<anonymous> (inject.js:59)
    

userSummary = $(".pv-top-card-section__summary-text").html().trim();

~~~
mitchas
Ah. Good catch. Do you have a really short summary/about paragraph under your
picture?

It looks like it's trying to read that and can't find it.

I'll have to fix that.

~~~
piptastic
Nope, mine is empty.

~~~
mitchas
Yup. That's the issue. I'll have to make sure it checks for empty/short
strings there.

------
ertand
Looks great. I love the styling.

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.

~~~
mitchas
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.

~~~
ertand
Yup, as solotronics said.

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.

~~~
mitchas
Hmm. I'll have to read into that more.

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.

------
kobiguru
can you add firefox to this .. for some reason i can not get the chrome to
work on my system.

~~~
mitchas
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.

~~~
reblws
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](https://github.com/mozilla/webextension-polyfill)

------
t0mbstone
Very cool! I've been wanting something like this ever since LinkedIn removed
their export functionality.

Only one problem... It only seems to be able to grab my most recent 2 job
experience items?

I would very much like the ability to configure it so that I could tell it
what parts of my LinkedIn profile I wanted it to include instead of just
automatically cherry-picking parts of it.

~~~
mitchas
That's one thing I really want to improve...

So right now it's grabbing your entire profile, but then it deletes the oldest
entries to get everything to fit on one page.

I'm planning on making it so you can pick and choose what goes on it instead
of it doing it automatically.

------
eitland
FWIW I've been a happy creddle.io user for a few years.

I (used to at least) let me import data from LinkedIn and use it to create a
custom cv.

------
s3nnyy
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?

~~~
mitchas
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.

------
shyn3
I'd list the type of output formats on the landing page.

.doc/.docx are mandatory for me to look at any resume generator.

~~~
mitchas
That's the hardest part of making an online resume generator. No real way to
generate a .doc/x...

But good idea to let people know. I'll add it to the landing page.

~~~
titanix2
You can generate Open Xml documents with the SDK.
[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/aa982683(v=office.1...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/aa982683\(v=office.12\).aspx)

------
lakshayg
Works surprisingly well. Just one issue, since I just graduated, I do not have
a whole lot of work experience so the generated resume looks empty. It would
be awesome if you could use the information in the projects section as well
and create a projects section.

~~~
mitchas
That's one of the top things on my list!

I was having trouble pulling the projects from the profiles, so I pushed it to
the side while I got everything else working. Now I'm going to focus on
getting projects in, as well as a few new themes

------
rvshchwl
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.

~~~
mitchas
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.

------
BinaryBuddha
Linkedin has a built-in 'download as PDF' feature that still seems to exist.
Doesn't create anything nearly as aesthetically pleasing as this - nice work.

------
adembudak
Cool, I've just tried. But it produce 'İ' letter instead of 'I'. A little more
template options also would be great.

------
southphillyman
Pretty cool. Now I have an incentive to populate my profile beyond the current
cache of titles and dates.

------
supermdguy
Wow, that works really well. It looks a lot nicer than the default "save as
pdf" option.

------
rhubarbcustard
Love the look of the landing page, is that a purchased theme you used or
created from scratch?

~~~
mitchas
Thanks! I created everything from scratch.

I actually decided to get away from all frameworks for the landing page. It's
just simple HTML, Javascript/jQuery, and CSS/LESS.

------
jedberg
This is really cool and would have been handy for me in the past.

But these days, if someone needs my resume, I send them to my LinkedIn page.
If they say they need something else, I do File->Print to PDF on my LinkedIn
page. It that's not good enough, I probably don't want to do business with
them or work with them.

------
dalore
Doesn't LinkedIn already have this feature? I've used it a few times.

------
kazmo_vilmar
Funny I stumbled upon this discussion because I just used this pretty cool
service called HipRez to revamp my plain resume into a resume website. Has
definitely been great for getting my foot in the door with job interviews and
responses to job applications.

Check them out here: www.hiprez.com

------
wolco
I thought there was a download resume link. Maybe they removed it.

~~~
mitchas
There was (is?)... but it just spits out a super plain resume you can't do
much with. My plan with this is to make it super customization, and make
themes tailored to a bunch of different professions.

------
expertentipp
Mitch, unemployed loser aspiring to work in Apple... perhaps it's satire of
Linkedin? Who on earth puts on Linkedin enough personal and career related
information to compose an usable CV out of it?

------
itomato
Among my skills is "[...]"

Not quite professional.

~~~
mitchas
That's because some people have dozens of skills, and I couldn't put them all
on. I added that to show there are more. It can be left if desired, otherwise
you can click the edit button and delete the brackets and periods.

------
uoflcards22
this is f'ing awesome

