Your resume is boring. How do you expect to stand out in a crowd of job seekers when your black-and-white, list-formatted resume and formulaic cover letter blend with all the rest?
Luckily the Internet is here to save you. With the coming of social media resumes, video resumes and visual resumes, the world of job seeking just got a lot more interesting.
Your Website
First, if you don’t have a personal website or blog, get one. It’s a great way to showcase your passions, thoughts and experience and portray yourself as an expert, whether you are searching for a job or not. If you name your website after yourself, it will probably rank highly when people search for your name online.
Consider listing your resume (or at least an “about me” page) on your website, so site visitors can learn more about you.
Hagan Blount, a self-described writer, editor and producer, hosts a compelling infographic resume (pictured above) on his personal website. The “Resume” tab on his site includes his resume, alongside a stream of his most recent tweets. The resume is creative in that it includes a non-traditional approach to his professional (and personal) history, complete with fun stats, QR codes and recommendation quotes from influential business people.
Document Sharing Websites
You probably already have a .doc or .pdf format of your resume in your job-searching arsenal. To get the most out of it, upload it to document-sharing websites such as SlideShare or Scribd as Erica Swallows has done.
Both sites enable viewers to download, embed and share your resume, giving it the opportunity for many more eyes to see it. As a bonus, these sites ranked highly on search engines so the next time someone is searching on Google for your resume, it’s likely he or she will stumble upon your uploaded versions on these sites.
Both sites allow users to upload revisions of a document. As you change your resume, you can replace it on SlideShare or Scribd to keep it up-to-date. This is particularly useful because the URL never changes, so you won’t lose search engine optimality or confuse recruiters who already have links to previous versions. Furthermore, the view count on each document never starts over, and the upload date, tags, description and document title stay the same.
Slideshare tends to have the best upload quality, because the formatting of the preview stays true to the original document. But it’s advisable to use both sites, as search rankings can vary.
Try to get creative, like Chris Ferdinandi, a human resources professional based in Boston. His visual resume has nearly 29,000 views and showcases his “not-so-traditional” approach.
LinkedIn
Of course, there’s always LinkedIn, a staple of the professional’s online presence. LinkedIn has become the standard online professional network, and like Facebook and Twitter, it often appears near the top of search inquiries involving people, as a result of its high ranking across search engines. When a potential employer searches for information about you online, you’ll want some semblance of your professional life to appear in search results.
Once employers find your LinkedIn profile, you’ll want it to be flawless and 100% complete. For the most part, you can bling out your profile by filling in the basics, asking for meaningful recommendations, using value-added applications and becoming an expert with LinkedIn Answers. For more detailed tips on creating a picture-perfect LinkedIn profile, check out my recent post on “HOW TO: Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile.”
(via Mashable)
Showing posts with label linkedin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label linkedin. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Friday, May 20, 2011
Bulls and bears debate over LinkedIn's IPO
On Thursday, LinkedIn's stock (NYSE:LNKD) skyrocketed to over $105 a share from its initial offering price of $45. During its first day of trading, the stock reached a peak of $122.70, a 173% gain. In comparison, Google, the last major US Internet services company to go public, was offered at a price of $85 and rose only 18% in its first day.
Investors are certainly not that surprised and triple digit gains in a single day are not unseen in technology IPOs. In fact, Chinese websites Baidu.com and Youku.com, China's equivalent to Google and Youtube respectively, both had triple-digit percentage gains on their first day of trading.
Jeffrey Weiner, LinkedIn's Chief Executive Officer, was not among the skeptics who raised an eyebrow at LinkedIn's phenomenal IPO. "To be honest with you, I didn't give a lot of thought to what the opening would be like... this isn't necessarily indicative of anything. The market will do what it will do. What we are completely focused on is our long-term plans and our fundamentals, and getting that right."
LinkedIn differs from other social media in that two-thirds of its revenue comes from selling recruitment services and premium access rather than being dependent on advertising fees like Facebook. In this respect, analysts believe that LinkedIn is more like a software-as-a-service company like Salesforce than it is a straight-up social network. However, only 0.5% of users have premium accounts and LinkedIn's future success still hinges on monetizing its massive unpaid user base through better advertising.
Kathleen Smith, a principal at Renaissance Capital believes that "the issue is the turnover of the users on the sites: the stickiness of the user, the reliability of the repeat user. You want a sticky user base for ads and revenues" She worries that users only use LinkedIn when they need to find a job and ignore it after they do. To LinkedIn's credit, the website has anticipated these concerns by unveiling new features such as LinkedIn Answers and the home feed to make its experience more social.
"The market will do what it will do. What we are completely focused on is our long-term plans and our fundamentals, and getting that right." -- Jeffrey Weiner, LinkedIn CEOThe big question is whether LinkedIn is the exception or the rule when it comes to valuing social networks. Tom Donino, a partner at First New York Securities wondered "why people were so enamored to buy this stock on the open," adding that LinkedIn's underwriters "had already ratcheted the price up to what everyone thought was a pretty high price." With major social networks like Twitter and Facebook preparing for IPOs of their own, it will be interesting to see how investment bankers value those companies after LinkedIn left nearly $500 million on the table.
Sources:
Wall Street Journal
Huffington Post
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Friday, May 6, 2011
The Social Media Job Search Checklist
In today's ever connected world, our lives are increasingly more public and susceptible to outside judgment. For those who are currently searching for a job, their social media profiles may actually hinder their chances if a hiring manager screens something that is not desirable. Not only is it important to optimize your social media profiles to avoid getting screened out, but a well-polished profile can also differentiate your application from countless other faceless candidates.
Regardless of whether you are currently looking for a job, you should continually work on maintaining your social media profiles in case a recruiter or hiring manager finds it while sourcing. Ask yourself the following questions:
Do you...
...on LinkedIn...
...have a 100% complete profile?
...consistently update your status?
...have a full and diverse network?
...have a professional profile picture?
...have genuine recommendations from peers, managers, and colleagues?
...ask for introductions to recruiters or hiring managers at companies that you would like to work at?
...participate and highlight involvement in non-paid projects (open-source, community, volunteer, etc...)?
...list hobbies and personal interests related to life outside of work?
...link to your employer, blog or other projects of interest?
...join groups that are relevant to your desired profession?
...ask and answer questions in LinkedIn Answers?
...add value to your profile page with applications?
...add value to your profile page with applications?
...on Facebook...
...respect the overlap between personal and professional lives?
...post pictures of family and friends that are suitable for work
...update your status often with text, multimedia, and links?
...keep interactions non-controversial and respectful?
...join groups and like pages that are relevant to your desired profession
...have links to your other social media profiles?
...on Twitter...
...tweet frequently and consistently?
...have a decent following of industry people?
...keep a healthy balance between personal and professional tweets?
...respond and interact with other Twitter users?
...utilize conventions like hashtags and @mentions?
...on your blog...
...have interesting insights about your profession or industry?
...provide glimpses into your life outside of work?
...have links to your other social media profiles?
...have a link or page for your current resume?
...create blog posts regularly?
...stick to non-controversial topics and opinions?
...have a blogroll with links to other interesting blogs?
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Xobni unveils new Gadget Store
This is not Xobni's first foray into integrating third-party applications into its product as the company launched a feature last year that allowed users to integrate Gmail Gadgets within Outlook. Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte commented on the pent up demand for third-party applications for Xobni: "We've had [vendors, partners and customers] approaching us forever on this one, desperate. They've tried to develop Outlook plug-ins in the past and it has been nothing but misery,". Both Microsoft and IBM have come out with similar services called Outlook Social Connector and Lotus 8.x notes respectively.
Xobni's Gadget Store will begin with 20 applications including Dropbox, Evernote, GoldMail, Google Translate, Atlassian JIRA, WebEx, Huddle, Microsoft SharePoint, Salesforce Chatter, Yammer, Facebook, Flickr, Hoover’s, Klout, LinkedIn, Twitter, Xing, YouTube, Yelp and Salesforce CRM.
While the Gadget Store is exclusive to the Xobni’s Outlook version, it will eventually extend to the Gmail plugin. The company, which has raised over $30 million in funding to date, has amassed nearly seven million downloads.
"We've had [vendors, partners and customers] approaching us forever on this one, desperate." - Xobni CEO Jeff BonforteXobni has free and fee-based versions of its Outlook software. There is also a version for BlackBerry devices with iPhone and Android versions still in the works, while a version for Gmail is currently in beta testing.
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| The Xobni Gadget Store will begin with 20 applications. |
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