Your Resume Is a Lossy Format. This Startup Wants to Fix the Compression.

The Macro: The Hiring Market Is Bad and the Tooling Is Making It Worse

The 2025 job market has not been fun to watch. NBC News, the New York Times, and the BLS’s own hiring lab all land on the same uncomfortable picture: job growth stalled badly last year, with over 1.4 million fewer jobs added than models predicted. The 2024 numbers weren’t even as good as we thought at the time. The labor market isn’t in freefall, but it’s tight in a way that makes the marginal quality of your application matter more than it did in 2021.

The dominant hiring infrastructure hasn’t meaningfully evolved to meet that.

Applicant tracking systems still parse resumes into keyword soups. LinkedIn’s skills endorsements are decorative at best. GitHub profiles exist but require active archaeology to interpret. A recruiter without an engineering background isn’t going to diff your commits. What you get is a persistent mismatch: candidates who’ve done interesting work can’t surface it effectively, and recruiters searching for specific capabilities wade through resumes that all say roughly the same things in slightly different fonts.

The portfolio space has attempted answers. Personal websites, Notion-based case study dumps, Behance for designers, GitHub for engineers. These are scattered, recruiter-unfriendly, and require real upfront effort to maintain. There’s a gap between “I have work to show” and “a recruiter can efficiently discover and evaluate that work,” and that gap is where a handful of startups are currently trying to build.

Projects Yard is the latest entrant, coming from a team with Carnegie Mellon roots. That background at minimum means they’ve watched enough recruiting cycles up close to have actual opinions about what’s broken.

The Micro: STAR Format Meets Searchable Directory

The core product is a structured portfolio builder aimed at tech candidates, positioned as a two-sided marketplace where candidates create project showcases and recruiters search against them.

Here’s how it works, as best I can determine from the product page and launch description. You feed in your resume or project decks, and an AI layer converts that material into STAR-formatted structured entries. Situation, Task, Action, Result. The pitch is that this takes about 15 minutes rather than the hours a well-formatted case study traditionally requires. Those entries then live in a searchable directory organized around skills demonstrated through real project work. Not keyword tags you self-selected. Skills inferred from what you demonstrably did.

The recruiter-side experience is the harder half.

Recruiter-facing candidate search lives and dies on data volume. A directory with 200 portfolios is mostly useless to a serious recruiting team. That’s the classic cold-start problem for any talent marketplace, and nothing in the current launch materials makes clear how they’re solving supply before demand, or vice versa.

The AI-to-STAR conversion is the technically interesting piece. STAR is a well-understood framework in recruiting contexts, and structuring unstructured project descriptions into it automatically would be genuinely useful if the output quality is good. That’s a big if. This kind of extraction tends to hallucinate impact metrics. What the product needs to prove is that the structured output is accurate enough that recruiters can actually trust it. It got solid traction on launch day, which tells me the problem resonates. But engagement depth was thin, which usually means supportive noise rather than power-user scrutiny.

The Verdict

Projects Yard is solving a real problem with a reasonable approach, and the STAR-structured AI conversion is a genuinely smart UX shortcut. If it works well. Those are two meaningful ifs sitting right next to each other.

The 30-day question is supply. How many candidates actually build portfolios, and are they the kind of candidates that would make a recruiter change their workflow to use a new search tool? At sub-hundred portfolios, this is a demo. At a few thousand well-structured entries, it starts becoming interesting.

The 60-day question is recruiter adoption, and I think that’s the hard side. Recruiters are not early adopters by nature. They have sourcing workflows embedded in LinkedIn Recruiter, Greenhouse, and Lever, and adding a new tab to that process requires a strong pull. “Better structured portfolios” is a real value prop, but it needs to be dramatically better, not marginally better.

The 90-day question is whether the AI output quality holds up under scrutiny. Candidates will inflate their STAR metrics. Humans optimize for systems. When that starts, the signal degrades fast.

What I’d want to know before fully endorsing this: actual recruiter usage, not just candidate signups. One side of a marketplace is just a list. That said, the instinct here is sound. The timing makes sense given a soft job market. The CMU orbit gives them real recruiting access to test against. I think this probably works as a portfolio tool for mid-level tech candidates who have solid project work but can’t articulate it well. I’m more skeptical it breaks into recruiter workflows anytime soon without a serious push on that side. Worth watching either way.