Vitae

Our Bids Team was pulling out their eyebrows. Wrangling our staff's inconsistent curriculum vitarum (CVs) for project bids, a long painstaking task fiddling around in Microsoft Excel, choosing the right projects and uniformizing disparate CV styles, despite having an in-house template, was wearing the team down.

"Surely you can automate this tedium?!" they said to the Data Science Team. "Probably," we said. (By the way, the Data Science Team is always the hero in these stories, because we write the stories.)

The two teams formed a CV committee, brainstormed, and devised the following process.

1. Separate the CV data from the CV style.
2. Uniformize the CV data format into a spreadsheet, and ask staff to keep their data there and current, which is easier than keeping entire CVs current.
3. Create a new CV style while we're at it, one in HTML format for the web and for PDFs.
4. Build a robot, preferably a web application, that combines the data and style to create beautiful finished CVs at the request of individual staff. Allow the staff to sort and filter projects, optionally by keyword, to build the right CV for the occasion.

Now several months later, we have implemented and trialled this process to good affect. Our robot, named Vitae, is successfully plugging away, making CVs in seconds. Here is an snippet of CV data we usually give to Vitae:

And here is an animation of Vitae in action:

"Vitae has seriously streamlined our CV making process. It has reduced the amount of time we need to chase people for CV updates, as they can now easily own the process of keeping their own data current. It has also reduced hours of frustrating formatting issues. I would highly recommend this to anyone seeking to improve their CV making and proposal processes." ~Amber Carran-Fletcher, Operations Manager at MRCagney

The "try it" button below works for MRCagney staff only. If your company is interested in the application, contact us.

Try it!