ResumeBot
“Giving recruiters and anyone access to my resume via a chatbot. ”
Update: Twitterbot currently on hiatus (i.e. server costs). Check out video for concept
Applying for jobs is pretty exhausting. Entering my second semester at ITP, I've been applying for summer internships and the steps of finding companies, seeing available opportunities, and sending a resume is a job within itself. Since chatbots have been a hot topic the last few years, I wanted to explore what the experience would be if people could just chat with me to find more information about my qualifications. However, in this case, a bot version of myself.
Resumes are interesting artifacts because essentially they are a corpus of text data on an individual's professional life. I decided to use the twitter platform because I use it currently to follow companies, venture capitalists, and people I find influential. Also, I envisioned my bot would listen to the twitter stream of job openings and auto-tweet my interest and that they could direct message my bot to learn more information.
First, I decided to just open up a google sheets file to see how I would structure my resume in data form and also see what kind of questions I could anticipate. Next, I decided to construct a JSON file mimicking my resume. I used a service called objgen which helped me create one on the fly and test different data structures.
I then proceeded to code a framework using the twitter stream API. The rita.js library also came in handy because the RiString class allowed me to use the words() method which split incoming sentences up. Let me just say that natural language processing is very hard, so my approach is pretty rudimentary. The main thing that that’s happening is a comparison of two string arrays. I define different variables into ‘helloWords,’ ‘educationWords’, ‘experienceWords’ etc. to “predict” what someone wants to hear from my resume.
Another thing I added was the ability for my resumeBot to follow you back if you follow it. Since a DM conversation can only happen when both parties are followers, I knew this would be crucial to my bots interaction. Once you follow resumeBot, it’ll tweet back to you saying that you can DM it to learn. Overall, I think this is a nice foundation for a bot that I hope to continue to work on. Also, I hope it can get me a job.