When Volen Vulkov was in his third university year, he went to Germany under the Erasmus+ Programme. He had the chance to stay for a second term there, but with no scholarship. Volen decided to look for a job by filling in and sending the standard German CV, the so-called Lebenslauf. After a certain period of no response he thought the typical CV was too strict and with a limited usage. Then he compiled his own version. The very first company that received the CV invited Volen for a job interview. Motivated by his own success he began to help his friends with exposing their skills and talents in full. Shortly after this initial success Volen and a couple of friends realized the market niche was not developed and thus the Enhancv platform was started. The software allows anyone to create his or her own CV, aiming at the full revelation of the person’s capabilities. Both the applicant and the employers are winners in this situation:

“A beautiful CV is not our goal, but one, reflecting the best sides of a person. Besides the typical info on education, experience, languages etc. one can fill in his or her best achievements that he or she is proud of. Employers find this information to be essential, since it shows whether the person is motivated, if the future employee wants to develop and what his/her interests are, also if the new expert will fit in the team etc. The standard CV provides only a picture of the applicant’s technical skills. In fact a person is much more than this… We are also focused on content – we give examples, types, we have a functionality which detects 30 – 40 different kinds of CV mistakes.”

The platform is in English, but each user may create a CV in any language. Besides:

“Our platform is of the ‘what you write is what you see’ type. Most of our competitors give forms to the user to fill in and in the end generate an automatic CV which cannot be seen during the fill-in process. Our users may create several CVs for different positions. Our design is also distinguishing and there are feedback opportunities as well.”

The creators of Enhancv receive positive feedback which makes them look for new development opportunities:

“At the moment we have some 250,000 users. 30 percent of them come from the USA and 10 per cent – from GB. We have 5 percent of each of the rest bigger markets like Germany and India. Our Bulgarian users are 3 – 4 per cent. Both employers and job applicants opt for our CV format because it is clearer, better structured and relying on personality. However, we are fully aware that more work is to be done on the format. This is only the beginning. We want to plug in additional functionalities and we have many ideas. In the future we would like to close a bigger circle of job seeking – to add job advertisements and online profiles of the users. However, this will all happen in the long term. For the moment we will focus on the CV format’s improvement,” Volen Vulkov says in conclusion.

English version: Zhivko Stanchev