
Accredible - Reusable and beautiful startup job applications - dannyking
http://www.accredible.com
======
toddmorey
I feel it doesn't really hurt the candidate in my mind to use a service like
this—provided I also get a very personalized email / cover letter.

The execution here really looks pretty good. However, as a business, I have
two concerns:

1\. I am generally wary of "life event businesses": things like job searching,
weddings, etc. Why? Because the already hard prospect of customer acquisition
is now even harder: Not only do you have to reach your target market, you have
to catch them right at the point of need. It's a rapidly closing window. I
think you'll hear a lot of: "Looks great, I'll take a further look when I
start to think about changing jobs".

2\. All the money to be made in the jobs industry is paid by the employers. I
think you might be trying to target the wrong party. It's really tough to find
good candidates, and employers are ready and willing to pay $1,000 to
recruiting firms for the right candidate. Plus, larger companies are almost
ALWAYS hiring, so there's no "event window" like described above. I'm not sure
what your revenue model is, but I'd certainly look to be earning revenue from
the employers and keep the service free to the job seekers.

~~~
dannyking
Our intention is to charge on the employer side to search for and be matched
to candidates if job seekers opt-in to making their profiles searchable (think
OKCupid for recruiters with actual evidence of skills & experience for you to
browse through) . The idea is that the cards that you use for job applications
can be generalized and turned into a profile (either public or private) to
show to future stakeholders as well as for reuse in future job applications
but that you can create new cards for new projects, courses, etc. without
having to apply for a job at the same time. We've had some good ongoing
activity with users in our closed beta who are using Accredible as a way to
track their ongoing learning (especially MOOCs - most of our early beta
testers came through the Coursera forums) and using it for much more personal
reasons - almost like a trophy cabinet of their learning. So we think we have
a good chance at avoiding the trap of users only using it for life events.
Appreciate your thoughts on this - thanks!

~~~
hootener
I think the cards are, at least as presented on the landing page, really
elegant and sharp looking. I would present my career related information this
way.

Constructive Criticism/ Devilishly Advocating:

In agreement with root comment, it's much saner to target employers, which you
seem to agree with. Therefore, it seems like presentation of the information
doesn't really matter _to employers looking to fill a role_ when compared to
how easily searchable, filterable, and readable (both machine and human) that
information is.

Therefore, having the service become something more of a "General purpose
learning tracking" tool feels at odds with this. Inherently increasing the
noise in your system and making it harder for employers to find experts that
possess the skillset to meet their need.In other words, it seems like general
purpose accomplishment tracking would increase the noise (as presented to
employers) and diminish the signal employers are willing to pay for. Have you
noticed this issue or given any thought to how to handle it?

Of course, I'm not privvy to your back-end or what you're presenting to
employers; the above criticism was just my first thought based on your reply.

~~~
dannyking
Thanks for the kind words! The feedback is much apprecaited too. It's
currently used largely as a learning tracking tool by our beta community (we
intend to launch the open beta early Q1 2014!). We started to focus on the
employer side a lot earlier than we had planned due to user feedback and
encouragement from startup employers (we wanted to avoid the chicken/egg
situation, which is why we focused on building up the consumer side as a
learning tracking platform first). Keeping people's data searchable,
filterable and readable is certainly top of our minds as we flesh this side
out and this is indeed one of our bigger challenges at the moment. We are
still working out the best way to tackle this without sacrificing too much
flexibility, but at the moment (with a smallish user base) a system of tagging
your cards and narratives with skills and then backing that up with a
combination of attached evidence and references (using LinkedIn profiles to
verify referee identity) for credibility seems to be working pretty well.

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Rudism
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.

~~~
dannyking
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).

~~~
trumbitta2
Kudos for the cover letter replacement. Maybe you could state it clearer on
the website?

~~~
Rudism
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.

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soneca
That's a interesting hiring aproach trade-off.

Would a hiring company prefer to receive a personalized aproach by the
candidate? It shows that the candidate is particularly interested in working
on that company and took some time and effort to apply. But also may signal
that the candidate is only saying what he thinks the company wants to hear,
faking himself as a cultural match and etc.

Or would a company prefer to receive an honest, idiosyncratic, but standard
candidate resume? It shows more about the candidate, his profile, culture,
personality. It looks more honest and straight forward. But also may signal
that the candidate is sending the same stuff for dozens of other companies,
including some that he just don't care if he is not hired. So he may not
really want or care enough to work on that company.

I would guess that nowadays recruiters care more about a resume personalized
to them, even if it is telling some white lies or half-truths.

~~~
caw
There's no reason even with a standard resume to only have one. You tailor
either per company or per position type. For example, for a iOS job, you'll
emphasize iOS, maybe Android since it's in a similar space, and de-emphasize
any other skills you have.

Resumes are marketing documents, not chronological histories of your life.
Still, even as a marketing document it shouldn't lie.

~~~
dannyking
Yes - absolutely. One of the frustrations we often hear when talking to
recruiters is that it's difficult to place confidence in anything written in a
resume without sitting the candidate down for an interview. We are thinking
that by allowing you to attach evidence of each of the claims you make it'll
be harder to lie using something like Accredible and at the same time making
it easier to add credibility to things that traditionally would be hard to
include on a resume such as online courses, self-education and personal
projects. With an approach like this, you can actually demonstrate all the
work, learning and knowledge you have gained.

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caw
I like the site (agree that it looks more Resume aaS versus Cover Letter aaS).

Could you elaborate more on the multiple narratives? If I have a long and
sordid job history with multiple industries, am I picking only specific
companies/positions that I worked with in my application, or am I picking
bullet points within the company? I'm slightly confused why Tom Webb would be
an iOS developer, Lead Front end, and Customer Service Manager. Maybe iOS,
front end, and something else programming related would better illustrate the
example. The example job application doesn't change going between Tom Webb and
Tina Zuick to really drive this home.

If I have multiple narratives, do they each have unique URLs?

~~~
dannyking
Thanks! This feedback is super useful for honing our wording. The idea is that
you create narratives around each of your key competencies/skills (e.g.
programming, design, customer service) - each consisting of cards that outline
specific projects, experience or education and then (optionally) back that up
with evidence for extra depth. You can then apply to jobs by selecting which
of your cards you think are relevant for that particular opportunity and tweak
the wording to tailor it to that startup before hitting apply.

We thought it would be cool to be able to showcase yourself, then reuse that
with minimal effort later - or just keep around as a way to track your
progress as you continue to hone your skills.

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huhtenberg
You absolutely positively need to switch from a rounded font you are using
(Bariol) to something less cute and cuddly. It has no place on _any_ resume,
leave alone a technical one.

~~~
prawn
And it's not "beautiful".

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RafiqM
Do you not find massive pushback from employers who _require_ that CVs be in
Word format so that they can be uploaded to whatever applicant tracking system
is being used?

And I think it's naive to think that startups aren't using ATS when there's
lots of free or open source systems available.

~~~
dannyking
We think that focusing on startup (and smaller company) jobs should tend to
avoid this type of requirement as they are generally much more flexible and
open-minded when it comes to job application format requirements and generally
want to see more depth on prospective employees - especially on areas like
personality traits and interests, which are hard to express in a traditional
resume or cover letter.

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2arrs2ells
As someone in the middle of a lot of hiring, I'd love to see applicants apply
with Accredible narratives! (And if you want to send one my way -
[https://getclever.com/about/jobs](https://getclever.com/about/jobs))

~~~
dannyking
Thanks, I'll shoot you a mail :)

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selmnoo
(Slightly offtopic -- but could you actually say a little about the
accredible.com site itself for a moment? Was it constructed using Zurb's
Foundation?)

~~~
dannyking
Sure - we are building it using the Grumby frontend framework
([http://gumbyframework.com](http://gumbyframework.com)) with Rails &
AngularJS

~~~
selmnoo
Thanks!

Of course, the reason I ask is because the site design was beautiful and was
curious about how a few things were done. Best of luck with accredible!

~~~
dannyking
Thanks - appreciate the kind words :)

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aheppenstall
Just wanted to say thanks everyone, we really appreciate your thoughts. The
open, honest and thoughtful discussion is what makes this community great.

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elwell
Ouch, there's a few display errors in Chrome on Windows. Not good given the
objectives of the service.

~~~
dannyking
Is there? Tested pretty thoroughly here on Chrome - did we miss something?
Thanks!

~~~
elwell
\- The "Sign up for early access" input box thats in the last section (not the
one in the first section) disappears as you scroll past it.

\- screenshots in "Find dream jobs and let jobs find you by telling your
story" are left aligned on large monitors (should be centered aligned as they
are on smaller resolutions.

\- the background image on the first section should load sooner. The text-
shadow'd text shows by itself for a couple seconds. the background iamge there
should be prioritized over the social buttons and over js etc.

Just my opinion on that last one.

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miguelrochefort
Yeah... I'll just use LinkedIn.

~~~
andylstephenson
Problem with LinkedIn is that you can _say_ you can do or know anything but
you can't necessarily _demonstrate_ it. I agree the power of a
recommendation/referral network like LinkedIn is useful, but this product
seems to let you show how good you are to others.

~~~
dannyking
That's exactly the idea! We wanted to create a way to back up the claims you
make about yourself. The idea originally actually came from a big interest in
MOOCs and self-education. We wanted to create a way to be able to use this
kind of education in job interviews that would be credible. It shouldn't
matter where or how you learned something - just that you did. We also wanted
to help people provide extra depth about the learning they did in more
traditional settings (like college). For example in my case I studied Computer
Science - but what does that mean I can actually do? This is a way to show
that in a (hopefully) elegant way whilst keeping it skimmable in under a
minute.

