Show HN: My AI Native Resume

https://ai.jakegaylor.com/

78•jhgaylor•4h ago

I've been deeply involved in working with AI agents and large language models (LLMs) for a while now. During a recent job search, I found myself repeatedly explaining my skills and experiences to various assistants. Around the same time, I was creating content for my website to help hiring teams understand my capabilities better and make informed decisions.

MCP had started to gain momentum and I saw a way to reduce my toil. So I built an MCP server that can effectively communicate my qualifications as a job candidate. This server acts as an AI-powered resume, providing an understanding of my professional background and a set of tools, prompts and resources to help explore my skills and experiences.

The code is open source, so you can create your own AI-driven resume server. Check it out here: https://github.com/jhgaylor/node-candidate-mcp-server.

During my job search I paired my mcp server with others such as notion, hirebase, and gmail to build a leads database, write cover letters, and track my job search.

Comments

dtagames•3h ago

Very cool idea, and prescient. How long before there are agents scouring for candidates using exactly these kind of MCP servers? This very post will probably give someone the idea for such a scanning/recruiting service.

codr7•3h ago

And how exactly is that going to help improve the hiring situation? It's already very inhumane and getting worse.

Are applicants just supposed to sit and roll their thumbs waiting for the right AI to have the right hallucinations?

I don't get the excitement for applying this crap to each and every aspect of our lives. What about the human experience?

echelon•3h ago

> Are applicants just supposed to sit and roll their thumbs waiting for the right AI to have the right hallucinations?

The really bright people are doing hype and bleeding edge things like this. Getting lots of notice, trending on HN (and probably LinkedIn), etc.

Everyone else? Yeah.

I don't mean this as a diss. This is just the meta. I got a really good job doing exactly this sort of thing. And it worked marvels for fundraising too.

I absolutely know not everyone has time or patience for this bullshit meta game. But networking and distribution are kind of like that.

tl;dr - If you trend on HN, LinkedIn, etc., you're already winning the hiring game.

codr7•2h ago

Good for you, and him, for a while at least.

What about the world?

Being good at this bullshit doesn't imply any kind of competence in anything that matters.

sho_hn•2h ago

The tech industry is increasingly performative.

echelon•43m ago

It's nothing new. All of human life throughout time has been.

jhgaylor•2h ago

If LLMs are going to get used to filter candidates out of jobs (they will, lets be real) then it is going to happen regardless of if a candidate makes a tool that explicitly provides their data in an LLM friendly format or not.

Resumes are already being run through a machine. We know what the next generation of machine looks like, so now as candidates we can put our best foot forward.

jhgaylor•2h ago

I think it would be a pretty solid improvement over crawling linkedin profiles. As candidates get better mcp servers they will be able to provide their data from where ever they choose to store it.

As discovery mechanisms for mcp and a2a get sorted, I think that we will see a new class of tools for hiring teams to find and evaluate candidates.

the_duke•2h ago

Time to create lots of Github repos that mention ad nauseam how "<your name> is the ideal candidate for jobs that require <skill>" to guide LLms to the obviously correct answer.

saretup•3h ago

Every new format or protocol gets used to display someone’s resume at least once (http://www.rleonardi.com/interactive-resume/).

Congrats on getting there for MCP resume before anyone else :)

nico•3h ago

That was a great read

It would be nice if the idea took off

Is there an already built AI tool that can take a regular resume and help someone easily generate and host their own version?

jhgaylor•2h ago

I made my llms.txt by asking Claude to generate it from my resume and website.

You can run your own version pretty easily if you can spin up an express server. I haven't dialed in the readme yet but this package offers all the mcp functionality provided by my server https://github.com/jhgaylor/node-candidate-mcp-server . You basically just need to provide a configuration object describing yourself https://github.com/jhgaylor/ai-jakegaylor-com/blob/main/src/...

furyofantares•3h ago

In reality your llms.txt seems a perfectly AI-native resume but I think I get that this is more of a tech or skills demo plus resume or something

https://ai.jakegaylor.com/llms.txt

jhgaylor•1h ago

I think the llms.txt is probably 80% of the value for 20% of the effort. I made it because MCP still isn't super approachable. However, with MCP I can offer more value. I can let you contact me directly from your assistant app. I can send you recordings of "me" answering your questions.

Mbwagava•2h ago

For those completely lost on what MCP means: https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol

It's not clear what benefit or use this is intended to provide (presumably they would have detailed its functionality if they intended to communicate this), but I assume it's ~super meaningful. I assume it's~ a scraping endpoint to add a url.

Edit: can't figure out how to use strikeout; please interpret the tildes as such.

jhgaylor•2h ago

Yes! Sorry. MCP is a new protocol from anthropic to standardize sharing tools and context with LLMs. Before, the tool calling api from openai was standard but tool makers all built their own mechanisms for defining and sharing tools.

It's a bit of a stretch but MCP is to LLM enabled applications what REST is to web applications.

sprobertson•2h ago

I like the concept, but I'm curious why MCP is better here (for something purely informational) over dumping a bunch of context in the prompt

jhgaylor•2h ago

The bulk of the server today is just context (and tools to get the context). I offer a contact tool when you use the hosted server because I can hide away my email credentials and expose a way for the LLM to send me an email.

Future tools I have in mind include taking a job description and returning a cover letter and sample interview.

Another benefit of using MCP is the LLM can request subsets of the context as it deems them valuable instead of preloading all of the context head of time.

sprobertson•2h ago

Got it, I have no experience with the "resources" part of MCP but this does seem like a good use case. I could see something like job description -> LaTeX -> PDF being nice too

notphil•2h ago

Cool idea. I can see this, if extended, being useful.

* A GitHub MCP exposing your code and issue contributions

* A site that exposes CV-data of candidates.

* An agent LLM iterating on all these, finding candidates that match roles.

Or vice versa, finding roles for a given candidate.

I might not be actively looking for roles, but I'd like to be aware of opportunities that might be a good fit. Recruiters historically have wasted my time.

lotyrin•1h ago

I've met a few good recruiters, to be sure. But the median one definitely seemed to just match candidates up to roles in an entirely mechanical way, not even as well as an LLM could (because it at least would be informed roughly about whether or not experience in X translates at all to experience in Y, and not be tricked into thinking e.g. Java and JavaScript are at all functionally related). I wonder how those folks are doing these days, and how well they'll be doing in a few years.

vunderba•2h ago

It's kind of the MCP version of this Show HN (Interactive AI Resume/LinkedIn) posted about a year ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38245665

Thanks for including the LLM rules (cursor) in the repo - MCP is new enough that I'll bet having that as a guidance was pretty helpful.

sho_hn•2h ago

Unlike llms.txt (which I think none of the major vendors have announced to be using/supporting, too, for that matter), there's currently no standard for AI assistants running a web search and discovering these end points yet, though, is there?

That means someone would have to jump through manual hoops to consume this.

Perhaps a needed bit of integration is a vendor that allows you to park a chat box on your website that knows how to call out into your MCP, so I can talk to your resume directly on your website. I assume this exists already, if not it'd be weird (it's not that hard to cobble together manually against the agent-ish APIs, after all).

jhgaylor•2h ago

Discovery for MCP is still an unsettled question. An adjacent protocol, A2A, has proposed using /.well-known for discovery. At the rate things are moving this won't be a problem for too much longer.

But yes, currently, you still need to read the docs to know if/where on my server you can find an MCP endpoint.

slt2021•2h ago

Kudos to you for doing this.

However, I will retire from this cursed industry if this will be the expectation in the future

jhgaylor•2h ago

I think I feel ya on some level but I also think that when the process is refined it will be much less exhausting to update our resumes with the help of an LLM. Underneath this tool is just consuming the data I already present to the world through my website, resume, linkedin, and github.

babyshake•2h ago

Once there is a "one click connect to an MCP server" workflow this type of thing will make more sense for this type of use case, but right now how would you say this improves on the status quo of a resume PDF you can upload to your AI chatbot and ask questions about? Aside from demonstrating your own proficiency with MCP tech, that is. I ask because the current amount of work and tech knowledge required is greater than it would be for the PDF-based workflow, but I might be missing something.

Edit: there was an example in another answer, "I offer a contact tool when you use the hosted server because I can hide away my email credentials and expose a way for the LLM to send me an email."

jhgaylor•1h ago

The standard PDF resume is optimized for the human to read. The information density there is pretty low. Take a look at https://ai.jakegaylor.com/llms.txt and compare that to https://jakegaylor.com/JakeGaylor_resume.pdf

Now we can spend our time more on the content and less on the presentation.

You can already use claude desktop, upload your resume, point it to your website, paste in some stuff from linkedin and output an llms.txt. You can get 80% of the way with just a couple of clicks.

podnami•1h ago

How is this not better for engineers than having to maintain a LinkedIn page or a PDF-based resume?

xboxnolifes•1h ago

Maintaining a PDF-resume takes minutes.

anshumankmr•1h ago

Can't wait for 2035 when we’re debugging the prompt queue pulling data from the prompt lake, while and resolving issues in the contex window eviction service, all while the team is 90% percent vibe coders with no coding knowledge introducing more bugs than features.

soerxpso•1h ago

How is this any worse than the current system where your resume is just keyword-filtered? It seems like a straight upgrade for my resume to be discussed by agents that know the difference between Java and JavaScript and aren't going to pass on me because my resume didn't explicitly mention 'scrum' and 'agile' as skills.

mgraczyk•2h ago

Hopefully this is a postmodern critique, but we really should normalize text-only resumes with tons of links, now that humans won't be the primary consumers

forrestthewoods•2h ago

Cute, but no. I will absolutely do none of things.

You need to make it as easy as possible for me to learn about you. If instructions are necessary it’s not easy. If you want me to feed links to an LLM then just do it for me and share the LLM output.

I care about only two things - a LinkedIn exported resume and a portfolio page. That’s it.

I don’t think I ever once ever seen an interesting or impressive GitHub repo. I’m not spending half an hour clicking through a dozen repos and god knows how many files.

nlh•2h ago

> Cute, but no. I will absolutely do none of things. You need to make it as easy as possible for me to learn about you. If instructions are necessary it’s not easy. If you want me to feed links to an LLM then just do it for me and share the LLM output.

Ok, typical honest-and-probably-correct-but-snarky HN take. Fine I can deal with this.

> I don’t think I ever once ever seen an interesting or impressive GitHub repo.

Dude. I don't think OP is the problem anymore...

robertclaus•2h ago

Cool idea. I was curious how this point works. I assume it would only include public code? Or are you proxying private projects through your MCP?

``` Walk through core technologies in your stack, explore my project work via the GitHub MCP server, and discuss design trade-offs:

Example: "Give me a code walk-through of Jake's use of AWS Lambda in his last project and ask him to explain the trade-offs." ```

jhgaylor•1h ago

My intention with that example was for them to explore my public work but with MCP I can hide my github PAT away on my server and let their assistant explore my private work.

I will make a better example text there, thanks. I'd much rather they explored my statbot repo anyway :)

vasco•2h ago

With each paragraph I thought more and more this was performance art. The voice of the text also sounds condescending in an LLM way, did you use AI to come up with those sections?

thomasfromcdnjs•2h ago

This is cool, going to steal some ideas.

I started working on this mcp server that updates your resume based off what you have been doing in your editor/git-commits -> https://www.npmjs.com/package/@jsonresume/jsonresume-mcp?act...

e.g. if you were coding a supabase feature, it checks your resume for supabase and adds it if its missing.

jhgaylor•1h ago

Hey Thomas - I hadn't seen your new server yet. I did migrate over to json resume as a part of building all this out. It works really well with LLMs. Iterating on it was a breeze compared to previous time's i've tried to dial in my resume.

Underneath this site is a package to make this easy to spin up for anyone. https://github.com/jhgaylor/node-candidate-mcp-server

I was thinking about spinning up a site to let folks deploy their own candidate MCP servers, it just needs a configuration blob. I wonder if we can tie it in with resume.json gists some way.

Svoka•1h ago

Honestly, what the point of 'endpoints' if none of the clients consume SSE/Streamable HTTP?

jhgaylor•1h ago

Claude Desktop just added support for remote servers this week. They've got it locked behind a pretty big paywall for now but I'm sure it'll make it's way to the standard plan. Others will come along. MCP is ~6 months old. There will be public clients everyone knows (chatgpt, claude) and there will be private clients (recruiter tools) that can consume those endpoints before long.

arjunrko•1h ago

Cool idea and all. Definitely catches attention and shows familiarity. But how is this different from uploading a normal resume to an assistant and asking it questions?

rkagerer•1h ago

When I started reading this, I actually thought it was done in the vein of sarcasm.

revskill•1h ago

Blog as ai agent.

thimwheet•1h ago

So... you couldn't explain what your skills are and then decided you will ask some "AI" to create a tool so that others could prompt it to have it answer what your skills are?

What do you plan to do if someone does give you a job and assign you a task? Tell your employer to prompt some tool to explain why you cannot complete that task?

pmarreck•1h ago

I love this idea.

But you know what? It's one step away from a system where AI's act as agents of our values, interests, needs and availabilities and mingle with other AI's to find possible business or romantic connections for us, all automatically.

Like a business coach/matchmaker and dating coach/matchmaker in one. Imagine just receiving high-potential connections for both, in your inbox, every day, according to whatever criteria you value.

My OpenAI ChatGPT knows me VERY well. It would possibly be amazing if a system existed that I could deem my chatgpt account a proxy of me for.

EDIT: I don't think there's currently a way to hand out a key to my (privacy-preserving except where explicitly allowed) own ChatGPT which also includes the conversation memory, unless MCP might provide this somehow

fmbb•48m ago

I thought the point of the large language model version of AI was that they can understand human communication.

MCP seems like we have given up on making the models good or smart. We are bending over backwards to make the internet easier to interact with for AI than for humans.

If general intelligence is on the horizon, this all seems a colossal waste of time. (Not your resume. I mean the general direction of AI development.)

isodev•48m ago

This looks like fun though (thankfully), it is illegal for someone to use AI to vet your profile under the AI act.

Imagine the dystopia of having to convince a chatbot of one’s qualifications.

tasuki•21m ago

> it is illegal for someone to use AI to vet your profile under the AI act.

It is illegal to discuss the (il)legality of something without mentioning the jurisdiction.

ramesh31•19m ago

Fortunately we don't have silly things like that in the US. Probably has something to do with why it was created here.

akomtu•47m ago

This is "AI engineers" are getting high on their own supply.

tasuki•18m ago

Without really reading this, how is MCP resume superior to the LLM just reading your resume in a text format?

jhgaylor•5m ago

Now we can spend our time more on the content and less on the presentation.

Another benefit of using MCP is the LLM can request subsets of the context as it deems them valuable instead of preloading all of the context head of time. I also offer a contact tool when you use the hosted server because I can hide away my email credentials and expose a way for the LLM to send me an email.

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