Yep. As we grew out our team at the last startup, we found that certain resumes from otherwise good candidates introduced various visual biases into the decision process because they looked awkward, lacked cohesion, focused on the wrong things, and failed to express important secondary characteristics like writing skills and their "outside the office" life. The Branch format, in our opinion, is a good looking way that helps remove visual bias through standardization and more pleasing content organization.

There are millions of websites that offer that stuff, and in our opinion, they're part of the problem. Branch strives to offer an effective standard that is beloved by everyone in the hiring process without excess features, cruft, or friction.

Branch was built as a personal hackathon during the COVID-19 quarantine after pondering the idea for a year.

If you have questions, comments, thoughts, or the like, hit us up at dev@branch.cx.

It's a WYSIWYG click and type jam. Follow the placeholders and the little guide icons that pop up occasionally. It's up to you to make the format work since what you input is exactly how it'll look on your public page, shared links, or exported PDF. We built in one formatting nicety  – **markdown bold** works.

Negative. Branch wants to help remove bias in the hiring process, so the choice is yours, and the layout adapts to look good without one. We encourage experimentation, send out the same resume with and without pics and do some A/B testing. If you do, let us know how it turns out.

Yep. Branch versions really is the only big feature. We want to make it easy for you to have a quiver of resumes, each tailored for different opportunities. Right now you can create as many as you want. We'll see how that goes after a few months.

We thought about that, and decided that we don't want introduce complexity around storing and serving up your valuable email address and phone number. Instead, just pop in a URL that you have control over so interested folks can hit you up there. We're thinking LinkedIn, GitHub, AngelList, etc. will work.

There's a few ways:

1. Make your main resume public at your /~username.
2. Export a PDF.
3. Create individual shareable links that can be tracked by impression.

You make a chair, but you don't sit on it.

Branch is built in the time-honored UX style of Pragmatic Brutalism. Everything you can accomplish is located in the toolbar of the editor. If it's not there, it's not a feature...yet. If there's something we've overlooked, let us know at dev@branch.cx.

Yep. We imagine we might charge a few bucks in the future if we enhance the offering, but we'd grandfather you earlybirds in. Membership would keep ads and data sales away, and create a stronger community. Plus, display ads are ugly, and selling data is untoward.

You do. If we ever get to a point where we do any analysis, it'll be opt-in and anonymized.

Rules include but are not limited to: You must be guided by common sense and proper respect and can't use our site to post inappropriate material, harass people, send spam, etc. "Be reasonable and responsible, don't do anything stupid, and you'll be fine." You can't resell Branch without asking first. The Branch format, layout, standard, and related objects are property of Branch. You must have your own account, and not misrepresent someone else via borrowed information.

We're trying to keep this as cookie-free as possible, for now, there are functional session cookies baked by our backend, but nothing dirty beyond that. We're currently using a free version of an analytics package, but it's confusing and we'll probably turn it off. We chose to not add the Google Analytics tag. We are capturing basic impression data into a MongoDB instance, but we'll only use that to improve the service. We count views of sharable links using entries in Redis. If anything changes with these statements, we'll notify everyone via the email you signed up with.

Yes. And we'll have a TL;DR summary in the style of 500px.com. If you have a concern in the meantime, please contact us at dev@branch.cx and we'll answer your question and attempt to address your concern ASAP.