Need help with an Idea...

[fooobee]

I am in the process of creating a career website and I am trying to come up with a way to make entering your resume much easier. For example, with Monster and CareerBuilder you have to fill out the form fields and then submit it. Since it would be extremely difficult to automate this b/c of all the different resume formats I came up with this idea.

The user would upload their resume (in any format). The server would convert it to PDF and then display in to the user (via ActiveX control?) and then the user drag and drop field categories to to corresponding section in their resume. It then would post this to my database based on the mapping. If done correctly, this should save the user a lot of time with uploading their resume.

Does anyone have any interest with working on this with me? Or does anyone know of an existing solution that already does this?

Thanks

 

[chiph]

There is a company that already offers this -- it's browser based (of course), but only works on IE 6.

What it would do is look at your resume and highlight sections in different colors (yellow for addresses, purple for skills, etc). You would then drag them into the various sections over on one side of the screen to select them, or you could select different sections and drag them over if it got the initial choice wrong.

This technique supplemented the AI code by having the human provide the training to help the neural network learn. Over time, it supposedly got better at figuring this stuff out so that people wouldn't have to correct it as often.

My previous employer had looked at acquiring either the company, or licensing their technology, but for some reason (I never found out why) the deal didn't go through. I suspected that it didn't do international at all -- feeding it French and Japanese style (in French & Japanese!) addresses caused it problems, which was a must-have for us.

Sorry, I don't remember their name. It's been too long.

Chip H.


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[fooobee]

Thanks, Hopefully I can find this company or their technology.

 

[fooobee]

chiph, is this the company

http://www.burning-glass.com/resumeparsing.html

 

[chiph]

Could be -- the name doesn't really strike any bells, but the technology sounds familiar.

Chip H.


____________________________________________________________________
If you want to get the best response to a question, please read FAQ222-2244 first

 

[chiph]

The other thing I was going to say was:

Just because someone else is already doing your idea is not a reason to not do it. If these folks are a publically traded company, you should look up their financials to see if they're making any money.

If they are, then great. That means they've validated the market for you, and that people exist who are willing to pay money for such a product.

If not, then you have to dig deeper to find out why. Could be they're a startup, and are still spending all their VC money on growing the business. Or, they've just made some large capital purchases that drew down their income recently. Or (of course), their product just isn't selling, in which case you should try and find out why, then don't repeat their mistakes.

Chip H.


____________________________________________________________________
If you want to get the best response to a question, please read FAQ222-2244 first