If you’re anything like me, you’re everywhere when it comes to the social web. Whether it is being active under numerous different Twitter accounts, or writing for multiple blogs, my social content tends to be everywhere, and this is a problem.
As businesses look more and more at a potential employees social world, filtering through the mess to find the best is becomingly increasingly difficult for employers to do. Just take a look at my various profiles, there is no way of knowing that I wrote a post that ended up on Diggnation, or that I used to work for Louis Gray and I am now available for hire. All of this is lost in the shuffle of all the other “stuff” that I go about doing online. Brazen Careerist intends to solve this with their newly released “social” resume.
According to Ryan Healy, a social resume is a, “first of its kind, active, live resume that lets you showcase your top ideas from around the web and share them in one convenient place. It’s a resume that highlights your thoughts and future plans as much as your past experience.”
So how does it work?
Brazen Careerist, like many other social networks, allow you to aggregate content from your blog and various popular social networks. You can dig through all your aggregated content on Brazen and then by clicking on top idea, that piece of content is automatically displayed on your social resume.
Your resume is the first thing people see when they visit your profile on Brazen, which obviously is the most important aspect of your social profile if an employer is scoping you out. This makes it easy for you to show off your best work online in a quick and convenient fashion for any potential employers.
At the same time, how effective is Brazen Careerist’s social resume?
Currently if you have a Brazen profile and do a quick Google search, Brazen Careerist isn’t even on the first page of results, while social services such as Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and often times Linkedin clearly dominate. For Brazen’s social resume to be effective, employers need to be able to quickly find Brazen in the first place, this currently is not happening. So while the conceptof a social resume is pretty neat (after all, doesn’t it make sense to show off your best work online?) it is moot in most people’s eyes because there is no way of discovering it in the first place.
So while Brazen has a good idea on their hands, they need to focus on making Brazen more discoverable for it to be worth investing in as a social resume. New features and the ability to add a top idea to your resume simply won’t do the job for Brazen in this aspect.
I am not sure about this, sure people will search for you when you apply for a job but having them displayed on your resume is a step too far. Is there not a middle ground in having a 'live' resume that is searchable and extendable.
Holden, thanks for the write up. We built Social Resumes as a way for people to curate all of the great content they produce on the web. With new social tools popping up every day, its becoming harder and harder to organize all the “stuff” you share and create. Also, you're right, employers are quickly adopting all of these new technologies and whether you like it or not, they're looking at what you're doing online. Social Resumes are meant to act as a filter for all of this content and give employers, recruiters or potential business partners an easy way to see the things you want them to see.
I did want to clarify one point you made. We made a conscious effort to search optimize Social Resumes. As you add more content to your profile, pull in your blog feed, tweets, etc. you'll notice that it quickly reaches the top of search results and in many cases outranks Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. If you do a quick search for my name, you'll see my Social Resume right behind my blog and ahead of my profiles on all the big networks. Many of our members have told us how pleased and surprised they were when their Social Resume appeared at the top of search results.
Thanks again for the write up, I'm looking forward to connecting on Brazen Careerist!
Hey Ryan,
I just did a few simple searches of random profiles on Google (including my own) and found, at the time of the writing, they weren't very prominent in the results. After looking through the profiles I checked out though for this post, they weren't very content heavy and obviously skewed my image of how prominent Brazen is in search results for active members.
Thanks for stopping by and clarifying that for me :D
Employers are already researching candidates on social media (although many deny it due to discrimination laws) and as such it makes sense for candidates to be able to pull all of their information together in one place to show what they are really like and capable of. Well done to SocialResume on coming up with a really good idea.
It sounds like a Linkedin App and a Facebook App to promote the facility is key to them growing awareness and user numbers and they may already have this in place. I am also surprised the word Resume is used in the title as that brands its use or application to simply applying for jobs. People like to see other profiles or resume's for other reasons too; like if you are working with someone new or looking for advice or partnerships etc
On a separate note I can't help thinking about how powerful it would be if Facebook ever decided to launch a professional profile facility where you could have a professional profile for business purposes like your Linkedin profile.