Finding a job is no easy quest, especially the one you actually want. The job market is flooded with — often overqualified — job seekers and recruiters who struggle to review the hundreds of CVs they receive with every new job posting. Hence, you might need something eye-catching, like an interactive chatbot resume, to set yourself apart!

I’ve previously written a piece on recruitment chatbots. However, that one was aimed at helping HR agents organize and get through the heap of applications more efficiently. Today, I would like to focus on candidates looking to make a lasting impression as early in the recruitment process as possible without going for an unattainable overkill like the famous animated online CV of Robby Leonardy.

What is a Chatbot Resume?

A chatbot resume is a CV in the form of a virtual conversation. Instead of reading down a plain list of your accomplishments, recruiters can chat with the bot and focus only on the parts of your work experience, education, and expectations that interest them. 

In a market where “smart voices” and original ideas take center stage, an interactive resume in the form of a chatbot can open doors that would’ve otherwise stayed closed. That’s probably the most sound career advice you can receive when filling out a job application. 

The testament to the fact is David Vidal, a marketer from Valencia, whose chatbot resume resulted in over 30.000 virtual conversations in just a week. What’s more, his CV experiment brought him thirteen invitations to face-to-face interviews and, subsequently, eleven job offers! His success story first appeared all over Spanish media in February 2021 and recently in international publications like Business Insider and New York Post.

The BEST news, though, is that you can create a resume bot, too. You can do it without coding and without using artificial intelligence. No-code builders like Landbot remove such hurdles from the equation and give you the freedom to experiment and unleash your creativity in optimizing your resume.

Chatbot vs. Traditional Resume

Using a chatbot as a CV offers a dynamic and interactive alternative to traditional resumes. You might have noticed that, for specific roles, recruiters now ask for video introductions, showing a trend that's moving away from static documents into more engaging ways to learn about candidates.

Chatbot resumes provide real-time engagement, allowing potential employers to ask specific questions and receive instant, tailored responses. This interactivity can showcase a candidate's personality, problem-solving skills, and adaptability in a way that a traditional resume cannot. Moreover, chatbot resumes can incorporate multimedia elements such as videos, portfolio links, and work samples directly within the conversation, offering a more comprehensive and engaging presentation of the candidate's skills and experiences.

Now don't get me wrong — traditional resumes are still effective. However, they often follow a rigid format that may not fully capture the breadth of a candidate's abilities or their personal brand. They rely heavily on the employer's ability to interpret and extract relevant information, which can be time-consuming and prone to misinterpretation.

In contrast, chatbot resumes streamline the process by guiding the conversation and highlighting key achievements and qualifications in a more digestible and interactive manner. This not only enhances the candidate's ability to convey their strengths but also improves the employer's experience, potentially leading to a more efficient and accurate hiring process.

How to Build a Resume Bot?

As mentioned, building a chatbot resume is no longer out of reach for us, humans without coding abilities. A variety of online tools and services allow you to make a bot reasonably easily and without coding. 

In this article, we’ll show you, step by step, how to build an interactive CV using the Landbot chatbot builder, the same builder David Vidal used to build his resume. 

So, let’s get to it!

1. Don’t Skip the Prep

Before you jump to constructing the bot, it’s highly recommended you do a little prep.

Firstly, get your CV ready and highlight the experiences, education, and skills you want your bot to share. Likewise, feel free to jot down a few other, perhaps more personal things that would be too much for a paper CV but could work great in an online chat, given the recruiter or hiring manager chooses to hear them. Consider your opinions on pertinent topics, personal preferences, strengths, weaknesses, or even perks and hobbies that make you, YOU. 

Secondly, consider the sequence in which you want to share this information and how much choice and freedom you want to give to the recruiter to navigate through it. For instance, you might want to build up to reveal some special skill or let the recruiter decide for themself.

Thirdly, take formatting challenges into account. You need to keep in mind that information sharing will happen as part of a conversation, and hence simply transferring CV info from paper to conversational format won’t work. You must respect the basic principles of conversational design.

Fourthly, think about the tone and language your bot will use to communicate. Reflect upon the balance between formality and informality. How causal can you afford to be without losing your professionalism? And, on the contrary, how professional can you be without sounding unnatural and, well, like a robot?

2. Register with Landbot (Free)

Once you have a plan, it’s time to start turning it into reality. 

So, if you haven’t done so yet, register for a free Landbot account. You can do this by clicking the SIGNUP button in the top right corner of our homepage.

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After registering, you’ll enter the app’s main dashboard, where you can choose to build your conversational resume from scratch or use a pre-designed chatbot template.

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3. Work from Scratch a Chatbot CV Template

Building Resume Bot from Scratch

Creating a conversational flow from scratch might need a bit more time, but it’s by no means harder. Landbot’s drag-and-drop interface is very intuitive and doesn’t require a big learning curve.

The great advantage of starting from zero is the freedom of expression you can breathe into your friendly resume. 

For example, one of the reasons David’s CV chatbot was such a success was his unusual formatting approach as an online interview. He starts the conversation with a small introduction, a link to his Linkedin Profile, and a contact email. 

Then he leaves the interviewer to pick from the three common interview questions:

• What’s “success” to you?
• What are your three biggest weaknesses?
• Why should we consider you?
  

This way, he shares all the factual data about himself right off the bat and so frees space in the conversation for more exciting topics that can set him apart from the rest.

4. Start Building Your Chatbot Resume: Introduction

Your chatbot resume needs a good introduction. In terms of this particular use case, it should include: 

• Short intro of who you are (name, profession, etc. sort of an elevator pitch)
• Intro on how to interact with the bot or info on what the recruiter can gain from the bot (e.g., David stated the bot is a “sneak-peek” to a presential interview and offers more profound insights than his CV)
• Access to your Linkedin profile or real CV (even if you are offering the recruiter a creative way to learn about you, it shouldn’t be hard for them to get to your regular CV if necessary. 
• Your contact info
  

Now, you can do all that as part of the introductory conversation, same as David. Alternatively, you can use other features to introduce the elements above.

For example, while using the conversation to share your name, profession, and the purpose of the bot, you can use the “Persistent Menu” block to pin the button with a link to your Linkedin profile in the header of the bot:

In the persistent menu, you can either create a button that leads to an external URL like our Linkedin profile or an online PDF of your CV. (Note: you can also create a button that will redirect the interview to a specific part of the conversation like, for instance, the “main” questions button selection).

Furthermore, you can use the header to share your email contact as well. To add this information to the header, you need to click on the “Design” section in the top navigation bar:

You can stay incognito using an illustrated avatar as in the example above. Or, there’s an option to include your photo as: 

• Bot avatar
• Image in the header (a place usually used to display a company logo)
• The conversation (as David did in his CV)
• Chatbot background (some design templates allows you to upload a background image which can be an image of you in a professional work environment)
  

Whatever changes you make to your bot flow, remember to click SAVE!

5. Kick-off the Conversation

After the introduction, it’s time you start the conversation. 

This is the moment your initial prep comes in handy. 

Take the information you decided to share and build the flow to answer those questions. Landbot offers a lot of different question formats that can make your conversational CV quite fun. You can use buttons and their many formats, picture choice (carousel), message block with rich media options, rating block to ask how the recruiter liked the experience, etc.

The conversation can start, for example, like this: 

Whatever conversational sequence you decide to follow, you need to make sure the recruiter has the option to go back and choose a different path — or stay in control of the path. 

There’re different ways to go about it. Firstly, you can follow David’s example and include, in every following set of questions, an extra button, “Return to previous questions.”

Alternatively, you can start the conversation with a sort of “main menu” featuring the main groups of conversation and — instead of adding a “go back” choice to every level of questions — add another button to the Persistent Menu block. This way, the recruiter can confidently pick a path and follow it, and when they exhaust that source of information, use the button in the header to revisit the main menu:

As you see above, in the beginning, the recruiter can choose any of the major topics based on their interest. However, when they want to go back to the selection, all they need to do is click the button in the header, and the bot will present the option once more: 

Smartly structuring your chatbot resume is perhaps the most essential part of the conversational experience. It must feel fluent and natural. Then, whether you decide to format it as an interview, more like an in-depth CV, or the new and interactive version of a cover letter, you’ll succeed. 

6. Give Your Chatbot CV a Unique Design

Once done with building your flow, move on to the Design section. 

Here, you can adjust the logo, title, avatar, font, color of the conversation bubbles, and background. What’s even better, your background can be anything — a color, image, video — the choice is yours!

7. Share The Bot with Recruiters

Are you satisfied with your resume bot? 

Now it’s time to send it to potential employers and generate some opportunities. 

All you need to do is make your way to the Share section of the top navigation bar. 

Click “SHARE WITH A LINK,” copy the newly-generated unique link, and send it to your potential employers. 

To Sum Things Up

Classic CVs and cover letters are things of the past. That is if you want to avoid being a victim of resume scanning. 

Forget about adjusting your CV to match each new job description. A resume bot provides an opportunity to share more of you right off the bat — your skills and experiences as well as opinions and perks. It enables you to turn the job hunt into your personal lead generation campaign and see the conversations grow. 

Now, all that’s left to do is start building your own chatbot CV and recreate David’s success!