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31 Comments

Shared resumes were a dead end, so I gave them a preview card and a way back

Until this week, a resume someone shared from ResuHive showed up as a bare link in chats and on LinkedIn. It had no preview and no way for the person who opened it to find the tool.

Now public resume pages get a proper preview card, plus a small "Made with ResuHive" link back.

The same week I also stopped showing Chinese-style layouts on the English site by default, fixed US layouts that were still drawing ID photos, and added six US-style templates.

Honest status: I don't have data yet on whether shared pages bring anyone back. I'll report when I do.

If you've built a "made with" loop, did it pull its weight, or was it mostly vanity?

on September 25, 2026
  1. 1

    How did you decide this was worth building in the first place?

  2. 1

    Helpful post. How did you get your first bit of traction?

  3. 1

    Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?

  4. 1

    Curious how long it took before you saw the first real results?

  5. 1

    Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?

  6. 1

    Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?

  7. 1

    Curious how long it took before you saw the first real results?

  8. 1

    The preview card as the conversion event is a sharp distinction. I’d also compare click-through by share context—DMs and LinkedIn likely create very different intent even with the same card.

    1. 1

      Yep, splitting by context is next. A DM from a friend and a LinkedIn post are basically two different products.

  9. 1

    Helpful post. How did you get your first bit of traction?

  10. 1

    Curious how long it took before you saw the first real results?

  11. 1

    Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?

  12. 1

    Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?

  13. 1

    Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?

  14. 1

    Curious how long it took before you saw the first real results?

  15. 1

    Have recipients of shared resumes started taking a measurable next step into ResuHive, or is the “Made with” loop still unproven?

    1. 1

      Still unproven. It shipped this week and I don't have numbers yet. I'll post them when there's enough to mean something.

  16. 1

    How did you decide this was worth building in the first place?

  17. 1

    Did almost the exact same thing this week. Every team link on my site now gets its own preview image (e.g. "Celtics fans, the arena needs you"), because a bare URL in a DM or a reply just looked like spam.

    Early signal: people actually click the card, the bare link got ignored. One gotcha if you use X: it caches a card the first time it sees a URL, including a failed one. One of my cards stayed broken until I added a version param to the image URL. Worth knowing before you debug for an hour like I did.

    1. 1

      That X caching gotcha is gold, thanks. Our shares mostly land in LinkedIn and chat apps, and LinkedIn caches too, so I'll version the image URL before I spend an hour debugging a stale card. When you say people click the card, is that from your own analytics or just replies going up?

  18. 1

    Love this angle, honestly. What made you look into it in the first place?

  19. 1

    Helpful post. How did you get your first bit of traction?

  20. 1

    Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?

  21. 1

    Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?

  22. 1

    Curious how long it took before you saw the first real results?

  23. 1

    Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?

  24. 1

    Curious how long it took before you saw the first real results?

  25. 1

    Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?

  26. 1

    Curious how long it took before you saw the first real results?

  27. 1

    The Chinese-layout-on-English-site fix connects directly to the ID photo problem. Both are the same bug: a locale-sensitive feature rendering in the wrong context. We hit this running our site in seven languages — the fix is always the same shape: make the default match the viewer, not the creator.

    On the “made with” loop: I don’t have data on ours because we haven’t built one, but the preview card matters more than the link. It determines whether anyone opens the shared page at all — without it, a resume link competes with every other bare URL in a chat window. The card IS the conversion event; the “made with” link is just the path after someone already decided to look.

    Worth tracking once you have numbers: how many clicks come from LinkedIn shares versus direct messages. The channel shapes conversion more than the loop design.

    1. 1

      "Default to the viewer, not the creator" is a cleaner way to say what I kept fixing one bug at a time. Agreed the card decides whether anyone opens the page. I'll tag share links by where they were posted so LinkedIn and DMs don't get lumped together.