Technology is making the resume obsolete faster than we think. Now, some candidates send LinkedIn profiles in lieu of resumes. They’re better than resumes in that they give extra pieces of information: recommendations, which can be misleading but often give some insight into the candidate’s personality, as well as the people we know in common professionally. The website Unvarnished takes LinkedIn recommendations to another level by making the reviewer anonymous, and therefore more candid.

But sites like oDesk and eLance more closely reflect the future of resumes and how companies hire. When you hire someone on those sites (or similar contractor marketplaces), you don’t see things like what college they attended, you see past jobs and employer ratings. This simple reputation score is much more reliable, fair, and is harder to fudge than any resume.

Other sites pull reputation scores out of passive indicators. RailsRankings.com checks things like contributions to popular open-source projects to determine the best Rails programmers. At CrowdFlower, we assign work in the smallest possible increments, and we’ve learned that past performance on work is essential in predicting future performance.

As companies feel pressure to hire faster and hire more specialists on a part-time basis, it gets harder to even phone screen lots of candidates. At the same time, more people work on a part-time basis and have work experience with more companies. Reputation scores in online workplaces will start to replace resumes as the main initial hiring criteria. As such, the scores will need to become more nuanced. More faceted reputation scores might tell you that someone is good at back-end programming and bad at communicating, a great fit for certain programming jobs but not others.

The resume is just one part of a hiring process, and there’s lots of crucial effort and process that goes into assessing someone’s skill once you’ve contacted them. But there’s a high cost of time associated with every candidate you contact. Improving the initial part of the hiring pipeline — and giving the best people a chance to prove themselves — makes businesses hire better and run more efficiently. At the same time, the ethical and legal issues around who owns our reputation data will grow in importance as that data becomes crucial in shaping our careers.

Will the reputation scores from various sites start to merge over time? Will someone build a site where I can look at someone’s TopCoder rank and their reputation answering questions on stackoverflow.com? Will a site like LinkedIn, or a new upstart like Unvarnished, turn into a one-stop shop for evaluating a potential hire? It seems inevitable that online reputation will become the best first filter on a candidate, and that someone will turn that into quantifiable data, like an SAT score so that candidates can be filtered faster.

Lukas Biewald is the CEO of CrowdFlower which is organizing CrowdConf 2010, an event focused on the future of distributed work to be held in October.

But the skills and characteristics that a hiring manager is looking for on a telecommuter’s resume aren’t always the same as when you’re looking for other jobs. Among other things, employers are looking for the following:

1. Prior experience. While it’s not always possible for an employer to find an applicant that has already telecommuted, having prior experience can move your resume to the top of the stack. There’s a learning curve that goes along with becoming a telecommuter, and every employer would prefer to hire someone who’s already figured out the nuts and bolts of telecommuting.
2. Self-direction. Telling a hiring manager that you’re able to work at your own direction is useful, but if you can show that you’ve taken on projects at your own direction and worked without guidance through your resume, you’ll catch a reader’s attention. When describing previous responsibilities, mention the guidance (or lack of guidance) you’ve worked with.
3. Great communication. Working offsite requires an employee with above-average communication skills. Make every aspect of your resume as clear as possible to demonstrate that you have great communication skills.
4. Technical skills. The specific skills that each telecommuting position requires vary but most employers will want telecommuting workers who are technically-savvy. Even if you aren’t already familiar with the software and tools a company uses to work with telecommuters, knowing a variety of other tools can mean that you can pick up new skills quickly.
5. Professional objectives. If you include an objective — and not every resume needs to — it has to be professional. There’s a certain type of prospective telecommuter whose objective is just to “work at home and do X,” where X does not convince an employer that the applicant is professional. Make sure your objectives don’t play into any telecommuting stereotypes.
6. Access to hardware. Some employers will provide equipment and software to their telecommuting employees, but many hope that you have a computer and an active Internet connection in place. Mentioning that you do, in the context of past positions, or other parts of your resume package, can speed up the application process.
7. Your reasons for telecommuting. Employers probably won’t outright ask if you’re telecommuting because of family, health concerns or other reasons, but they’ll make assumptions. It’s probably best to be clear about your reasons for wanting to telecommute from the outset.

Share your resume tips in the comments.

Photo by Flickr user Fabio Bruna, licensed under CC 2.0

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Even if they’re not for you, the question sparked by these graphical resumes is: What are our options for resume-building in the twenty-tens? We all know a resume is supposed to show off our skills and experience, but in the digital age, there’s no end the ways you might communicate these things.

Let’s put some boundaries around this discussion, then: we’ll talk about paper resumes only. And we’ll assume that the company advertising the job wants to peruse your application letter and a short resume before they visit your site.

Let’s look first at a few of the more common resume tactics from the “naughties” (and earlier).

Where We’re Coming From

The most common, basic inclusions for a resume are:

• contact details
• employment history
• education
• achievements
• referees

In addition to these details, resumes may include:

• a list of relevant skills
• an outline of extra-curricular or spare-time projects and interests
• a career or life objective
• a favorite or inspiring quote
• a personal statement of your philosophy
• a headshot

No we’ve covered the basics and we know where resumes have come from. But where are they going?

Where We’re Going

The graphical resume might be handy for those who are designers themselves, or have a designer on hand to tailor their resume to suit every job they apply for.

But what about you? There’s little point, for example, in me creating a graphical map of my experience, because my skills are neither figures- nor graphically-oriented. It would be cute, sure, but not particularly relevant.

The first rule of resume recreation should be: Let your resume reflect you.

If you love travel, or you’ve worked in a range of different locations, maybe you’ll create a visual resume using a map of the world. If you’re in tourism, or transport, you might consider a roadmap. If you’re in IT, what about a circuit board? If it’s business consulting or project management, can you use a process flow, Gantt chart or venn diagram as the basis for explaining what you do?

Conceptual Resumes for the Non-visual

If you’re not into a graphical representation, you may consider theming your resume document around your work.

The second rule of resume recreation should probably be: Try to avoid being dinky or cute. Keep it simple and respect your readership.

This second rule is a fine line to tread. Let’s look at a couple of possible examples and you can make up your own mind.

First up, a book editor might lightly theme their resume around the structure of a book, for example, describing their work history in “chapters”:

“Chapter 1, 2001-2003, in which I work for Publisher, LLC and learn the fine art of author management.”

The book editor could theme their entire resume in this way, using the parts of the book — dedication, contents, acknowledgments, introduction, chapters, references and further reading — to bring their goals, experience, education, skills, and referees together in a way that might appeal to prospective employers.

A journalistic photographer could present their resume in the style of a newspaper or magazine, with the articles — or simply captions — for each image identifying the photograph’s subject, the year it was taken and which publication it appeared in, the technical or practical challenges the photographer overcame, and the skills they used to produce each shot.

An event photographer might present their resume as an album, listing the project challenges, techniques and skills they used, and relevant referees underneath each image in the same shorthand way we annotate wedding or holiday photographs.

A PA could present their resume using diary format, making each item in their work history an “appointment”, listing their skills under a heading like “reminders”, including their career goal as a “to-do item”, and so on.

In each case, the theme I’ve suggested for the resume reflects something about the individual that’s integral to their success in the field.

For example, the PA could theme their resume around a document like a memo, or meeting minutes, if creating these tools would be part of the job they’re applying for. But the diary format suggests that the PA is focused on time and resource management, that the person gets things done, can juggle many tasks at once, and so on.

So the third rule of resume recreation should be: Choose a resume format that reflects a crucial quality you’ll need to succeed in the role you’re applying for.

Where to from Here?

Once you have your paper resume prepared, you can consider how to translate it to other media you might want to use.

Perhaps you’ll use it to build (or revamp) your web site as part of your larger social media resume. Perhaps, if you’re a creator of some kind, you’ll augment it with an online, physical or CD-based portfolio of work samples.

Have you used an alternative to the standard, old-school paper resume? Tell us what you did — and how it worked.

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CeeVee simplifies the process of posting your resume online. The team behind CeeVee is working on developing more tools that will help employers and employees connect, but the minimalist approach to resume-building taken with CeeVee makes it a particularly useful tool.

Your account, when you first log in, is essentially a fill-in-the-blanks resume. It has space for a small photo and your contact information, but the biggest sections are reserved for your summary, skills, experience and studies. If those sections don’t really match how your career has progressed, you can delete sections in the sidebar, as well as add sections like awards or languages. Filling in CeeVee’s resume is a fast process; the part that took longest for me was figuring out what dates I had actually worked in particular jobs.

There are other features for creating your resume, such as a selection of themes, allowing you to switch between modern, classic and plain text. The emphasis, however, is on simplicity: You’re on the site to get a resume written and up.

Once you’ve completed your resume on CeeVee, you can mark it as public. You can use a URL you’ve selected for it: ‘http://www.ceevee.com/yourname.’ That sort of link will probably be a little more user-friendly for a prospective employer than a long, complex link. You can also use CeeVee to generate a PDF or to print your resume. In these cases, you’ll wind up with a professional-looking resume with a clean layout.

If you’re trying to get your resume out and around to as many people as possible, just in case someone in your social network has a lead on a job, CeeVee provides several resume-sharing tools. The site can generate code for a badge for your own blog or web site. You can also share your resume on Twitter or Facebook with one click.

The simplicity behind CeeVee is a major benefit when you look at the many resume sharing sites already available. Some offer you the opportunity to gather recommendations from your past colleagues or earn verifications from your employer, but if you need to get a resume up in time for that phone interview you have in an hour, those features aren’t going to help you. And for employers that may not be as comfortable with social media, CeeVee’s straightforward approach will be much easier to manage. The site’s tagline is “quick and painless resume management” and CeeVee lives up to it.

Share your resume tips below.

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Flowz, the developer behind Raveal, has since introduced a variety of new features to try to up the game of the fledgling web site. Some of these are little more than aesthetic upgrades, but some are substantial improvements that really change the way the site works at its core.

Themes

Raveal now places a strong emphasis on what they call “Your Personal Brand.” It’s a concept not unfamiliar to us here at WebWorkerDaily. Part of that approach, as far as Raveal is concerned, involves letting you show off your skills, work history, and traits using a personalized theme.

Raveal themes work and look a lot like blog themes, for the most part, but some boast impressive features, like Flash integration, that really make them stand out. You can use the default set, create your own using a pre-made layout and some custom CSS, or choose from one of the available community themes (which is a little light on content right now). If you know a little about how CSS works, but aren’t comfortable building your own site from scratch, it’s a good set of tools to have.

I was a little miffed to find that there was no way to preview my profile unless I made it publicly available, which isn’t something I wanted to do before ensuring that my chosen theme would look good with my content. Even just a live preview of the theme in question with generic content would’ve been sufficient.

People Showcase

Want to get noticed? Flowz wants that for you, too. That’s why it introduced the “People Showcase,” a section which shows off the best and brightest of those found in there network. According to Flowz, being highlighted on the Showcase nets you an additional 400 views per month, a number the company says will grow as Raveal gains popularity.

There’s no word on how exactly people are chosen to appear in the Showcase, but in a blog post detailing the new feature, Flowz staff indicates that all you need do to be considered is make your profile publicly viewable. Presumably, staff members comb the public directory for talented individuals with complete, up-to-date profiles.

I like the presentation of the People Showcase, and the idea behind it, but only time will tell how the actual effect it will have on individual member’s career aspirations.

Company Profiles and Job Postings

Probably the biggest new feature is not on the employee side at all, but on the employer’s. Companies looking for prospects can now create a profile complete with a blog feed and job listings.

There’s even a back-end workflow that HR staff can use to manage applicants, allowing them to score potential employees as “Undecided,” “Thumbs Up,” or “Thumbs Down.” They can also keep notes on every application, the content of which can be shared with other staff who are assigned user privileges. Even if you want to share with someone who isn’t a Raveal user, you can do so using a Guest Pass.

Unfortunately, companies can only list one job posting at a time unless they pay for a Pro account, which ultimately hurts job searchers most of all. Hopefully the back-end workflow features prove worthwhile enough that companies end up going the pay route.

New Pro Features

A couple new features were obviously designed to make Raveal Pro accounts more appealing, as they’re only accessible once you switch to a paid account. The first is Voice, which allows you to pull content and comments from your blog, Twitter feed, Facebook, etc. to show off on your Raveal profile in addition to your standard Resumé and Portfolio information.

It’s definitely a bold step, and one that acknowledges that for many professionals working online today, their social media presence is as much a part of their career goals as is their work history. But it’s also risky, since we all know the dangers associated with allowing potential employers access to things like Facebook, which might not always paint you in the best possible light.

You can also now include an audio introduction if you have a Pro account. It’s interesting, but ultimately kind of gimmicky, in my opinion. Though I absolutely hate the sound of my recorded voice, so I might be biased.

One thing’s clear: Raveal is doing its best to stand out from the crowd and bring something truly new to the often arduous task of finding work online. Whether or not the specific things it’s trying are of value to you is another thing entirely. It’s definitely worth a look though, especially if you’re a content producer who isn’t getting anywhere with the established career finding resources online.

Have your tried the new features in Raveal?  Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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The basic idea behind WorkScore is that anyone with a company email address can review their workplace and colleagues. Furthermore, they can do it anonymously, leaving a little more freedom to be truthful about what they think. When reviewing a colleague on WorkScore, a person can document skills, write “thank you” notes and point to specific confirmations on the part of that colleague. Assessments are confidential, meaning that the subject of the assessment does not actually see it, although the information does contribute to an overall “WorkScore.”

While your first reaction to the idea of anonymous assessment may be concern, the subject of any review is able to choose whose assessments count. If you receive an assessment from someone who may not be perfectly objective about your abilities, you can instruct WorkScore to ignore that information.

Your WorkScore provides a clear picture of your skills when you’ve received a little information from your colleagues. You’ll have an overall numerical score that draws on how your co-workers have ranked you in different skills. You can also add any major contributions you’ve made to your employer — a viewer will be able to see whether or not your co-workers have confirmed your contributions.

WorkScore goes beyond just reviewing colleagues, however. You can also review the company you work for, and look through potential companies during your search for a job. All reviews of workplaces are anonymous — although you can’t add a review without an email address from that company — and they’re public. WorkScore focuses on providing information about the values of a particular company, as well as finding a good fit for yourself. You can also review a company as a client, business partner, supplier or other professional who doesn’t actually work for the company.

For web workers, the ability to add confirmation of your skills may be particularly useful. It offers an opportunity to not only tell a prospective employer that you’ve already worked as a telecommuter or independently, but to have your colleagues — perhaps a manager or team lead as well — describe how well you do when you work remotely, and can provide a shortcut to proving that you can work independently in a way that a traditional resume can’t.

It is necessary to get your co-workers on board with using WorkScore to document accomplishments and skills: a social resume just isn’t that useful if other people aren’t involved. Depending on your workplace, getting your colleagues and management on board with using WorkScore to rank each other could be a tough sell. Overall, however, the information that WorkScore could be just what employers need to better judge potential employees.

What do you think of the “social resume” concept?

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photo by woodleywonderworks

If you’re a freelancer, making a great first impression with clients is vital. Here are some of my tips for making sure that first impression is a good one.

Like many other freelancers, I dread hearing these words from a potential client: “Can you send me a copy of your resume?” Resumes will never be a great way for me to showcase my work, and I don’t think they make a great first impression. They also seem a little old-fashioned for those of us who work almost entirely online. My body of work is online, and that says so much more about me than I could possibly cram onto a one- or two-page resume. However, many people still ask for a resume, and you have to be prepared to send one to potential clients or employers. If you’re preparing an “old school” resume, FreelanceSwitch has some good tips.

I have a slightly sneaky technique that I use to get around the standard resume request and show off my online work in the process. I send the prospect to the “About” page on my web site. It contains my bio, my consulting page, blogs and other projects, current and past work, speaking engagements, places where I have been quoted, and more. When I send them the link, I let them know that they can download a PDF version of my resume under the “More About Dawn” section of the page. With any luck, they’ll click through a few links to see examples of my work while scrolling down the page to get a copy of my resume. You might also want to read Celine Rogue’s post about creating a social media resume for more hints about creating a more modern resume.

When potential clients don’t ask for a resume, I send them links to my “Consulting” page for more information about the services that I offer, and I send them a link to my “About” page to see examples of my work.

However, many potential clients find me through searches, referrals or other sources, so my web site also has to speak for itself. I try to write frequent blog posts to show potential clients that I have interesting things to say and that I take my own advice about blogging regularly. I use tabs across the top for navigation to important pages on my web site to make it easy to find key resources and information. My sidebar is prioritized with the most important items at the top, starting with consulting, information about me, contact details and subscription links.

As I was preparing to write this post, I realized just how long it had been since I had overhauled the content on these pages. You won’t make a good first impression with stale content, so I just spent a couple of hours taking a critical look at several pages on my web site and making major changes.

Here were a few things I focused on:

• I moved my contact information to the top of several pages to make it easier for people to reach me.
• I made sure that the most important content is at the top of the page and focused on strong first paragraphs to make a better first impression.
• I removed some duplicate content. For example, I had my bio (several different versions) on several pages. I moved the full bio to the “About” page and put a reduced bio with items that rarely change on the other pages, with a link to the complete bio. This will make it easier to update and keep track of in the future.
• I checked links to make sure that all of my links for older content (past speaking engagements, old work projects, places I have been quotes, etc.) were still live and updated or removed the ones that were no longer working.

How do you make sure that you make the best possible first impression online?

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Raveal is aimed at the job hunter, promising to represent those who list themselves with the service as people, not assets. It’s an attractive prospect when you’re coming from a situation where you feel significantly less than human in the meat market that is Monster. And it has a distinctly simple, clean Web 2.0 look that at least shows the site’s designers take their job seriously.

Once I got into the process of actually creating a profile, though, I began to wonder if the look and feel of the site were the only things that distinguished it from its predecessors. The information asked for when setting up your public profile is suspiciously similar to the information you’d be asked for on Workopolis or any similar site. I suppose the basic search criteria that employers will use doesn’t vary that much, so maybe Raveal using it can be excused. Still, for a modern Web 2.0 app, I found the categories provided to be pretty traditional and restrictive.

Raveal’s resume creator is a little more free-form. The standard “Objective,” “Experience” and “Education” fields are all there (although you can customize even these basic section titles), but you can also add as many additional custom categories as you want. Each section has entries within it, which consist of a title and a description or details. It’s a very simple format, but it does allow for considerable customization.

Finally, the “Portfolio” section offers what is perhaps Raveal’s most important distinguishing feature. In it, you can write a brief bio for yourself (or, optionally, use your resume objective), and then add “Galleries” to fill it out. For each gallery you can set a title and decide whether or not it is publicly viewable, and you can add as many items as you want, up to your storage limit (100 MB on free accounts, 1 GB for Pro users). File types supported include images, videos, audio, and Flash files, and also entire web sites, so long as there is an index.html file and your internal links are relative. This could be very handy for web designers who have templates or designs not hosted elsewhere.

Raveal’s Portfolio feature saves it from becoming yet another Workopolis or Monster. It gives you a visually rich way to present your work to prospective clients, without having to link them off to a bunch of different locations. So far, I don’t see any reason to jump to a paid subscription just yet, but this is an early release, so we’ll see what Raveal brings to the table in future iterations.

Share your online job search experiences in the comments.

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It’s surprising, then that people so often overlook the value of a personal blog in the social media web.

Not Just a (Live)Journal
Once you’re making your living online its time to say goodbye to the “Dear Diary” mode of blogging. Yes, you’ll miss it, but there are less risky ways to exorcise the exhibitionist in you.

Bidding farewell to the confessional style will benefit you in a number of ways. First, you’ll open up your potential audience beyond your immediate circle of friends/family members. You can keep a private blog for that purpose, but any publicly accessible site should have wider appeal, if only slightly. Second, you’ll avoid embarrassment. We’ve all heard the horror stories of potential employers shying away from employees with questionable content on their Facebook profiles. That sort of thing isn’t limited to banks or traditional employers. Even the most casual web-based employer or client will raise an eyebrow at your four paragraph-long expletive-filled condemnation of your neighbor who has loud parties.

Tend to Your Garden
Dead plants do not increase your curb appeal. Likewise, stale posts do not give off the impression that you care about your blog. A well-kept and current personal blog will show prospective employers and clients that you are a consistent, self-motivated producer who can see a project through to completion. And depending on your content, and the job you’re aiming for, a personal blog could be the perfect place to prove you’re a subject matter expert. Plus its a ready made portfolio of clips if you’re angling for a writing job. Make sure though, that if you’re reprinting material you’ve posted elsewhere, you have permission to do so.

Link (It is Social Media, After All)
A blog is a space for conversation, and with a personal blog, you’re lucky enough to be able to open up dialogues about pretty much anything you want to. Using your blog as a jumping off point for discussion will open doors, grow your network and result in contacts that will only add to the resources at your disposal in your professional life.

Linking (and source linking) also show that you know what you’re doing, if you’re looking for blogging work, and that you can communicate, research, and connect effectively. All skills, you’ll notice, that employers prize.

Personal blogs, in the end, are not so personal after all. If they’re publicly accessible, they’re part and parcel of your web worker resume, which is far more than a piece of paper in the context of today’s social media and online communities. Whether your blog is a practical enactment of the qualities you want to show employers, or a glaring reason not to hire you, is up to you.

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But things don’t stop there. What makes VisualCV stand out is the variety of content that you can add to areas like the Portfolio sidebar. Web sites you’re proud of creating? Put up screenshots. Video or audio recordings to show off your people skills? Put those in too. The end result is somewhere between a traditional resume and a single-page portfolio web site. VisualCV also offers you control over who can see your work, and lets you create multiple versions to put forth a different persona to different readers. Best of all, it’s all free.

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