I heart this resume. There’s intelligence, a strong design aesthetic and originality all right there plain to see – and it’s even on one page.
There’s one problem though. You can’t enter a resume like this into an applicant tracking system now can you?
The other week I wrote about the concept of a personal brand someday replacing the resume as we know it. “No way!” was pretty much the consensus. Not yet might be more like it.
We’re certainly evolving technology simply by the way we use it – Twitter is the prime example. And there are a lot of us out there (not just the creatives or the marketers) who feel limited by the Word doc approach to a resume. Or want to create an online “portfolio” of our work at the low, low cost we’ve all started to become accustom to online – free.
I was sent more than one invite recently to check out VisualCV. It’s worth your time and a site to watch. It took me all of two minutes to set up an account and that included pulling content from my LinkedIn profile with one click.
Big deal, right? There’s more to it than that. Visual CV also provides the ability to add content – a video, a document, an audio clip, your best presentation via SlideShare – to your profile. Expertise and accomplishments can be more clearly demonstrated and it helps paint a better picture of an individual’s abilities for a recruiter.
What’s also valuable to a professional is that the virtual resume created resides on a URL that can be left open to the public, discriminately shared, or hidden until the person wants it out there.
The site’s name may lead you to believe that its only about CVs, but employers are also able to add Company Profiles. In addition to building your brand on a growing site – currently there are hundreds of employers and tens of thousands of resumes – you will have another opportunity to get more bang for your buck. Your efforts don’t end with the end of an email blast or print ad run so use those materials to their full advantage and populate a Company Profile with them (and a podcast, your video, etc.) on this site, on Facebook, on a potential landing page, microsite … you get the picture.
The resumes on the site may have the same problem that plagues Mike Anderson’s above, they can’t be dumped into an ATS. Considering all the technical issues that surround integration, that “upgrade” may be slow to come. But, as more people embrace this sort of option the evolution of how we sell ourselves and connect with the organization that ultimately employs us will continue change.
Want more of an overview of VisualCV? Here’s one in “plain English”:
