Anybody who happens to be job hunting right now might be interested in something I just read. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a new trend in resume creation and distribution. It’s called a website resume. Basically, you contact a service, and they create a resume for you that has it’s own url. you can put text, pictures, links, and (in some cases) graphs and even videos! It sounds pretty cool to me. Plus, if you are on a social networking site such as LinkedIn you can connect your web resume to your profile there and let all your contacts know your qualifications.
The Journal tested four different web resume services, and reported on their quality, ease-of-use, and probable effectiveness to potential employers. I thought it was very interesting that the best resume site was also the one that was completely FREE. Here’s what the Journal had to say about the winner: VisualCV.
We were impressed by how easy VisualCV, a free service, was to use and by the wide array of colors, fonts and backgrounds. You can choose to have your information automatically transferred from your LinkedIn account, and like the other services, you can cut and paste from your resume. We really liked the clean presentation of Web links to our work and how we could download the site into a PDF version. It’s also possible to upload images, video, audio and almost any document. Though phone customer service is available, we didn’t need it because the site was easy to set up.
The Journal called upon the services of a professional recruiter to give her opinion of the various sites. Here’s what she had to say:
Ms. Johnson said VisualCV.com was far and away the best of the four sites. “It has a clean, clear, crisp layout,” she says. From an employer’s perspective, she felt it is easy to follow, and a visitor isn’t left wondering what to click.
One last point to remember, though, is that technology will never trump the power of personal impression. Here’s the Journal’s conclusion:
So while technology is wonderful in many respects, in the case of Web r�sum�s, we think tradition trumps fancy Web sites. Though the sites aren’t difficult to design, they won’t necessarily give you a leg up over other job candidates and might even be a hindrance if not properly executed, as Ms. Johnson pointed out. When it comes to a r�sum�, says Ms. Johnson, substance trumps style, so fancy Web sites aren’t a substitute for knowledge, skills and abilities. In this challenging environment, she adds, a Web-based version, such as one from VisualCV.com, and a thorough LinkedIn profile, is a smart complement to a paper r�sum�.
To read the entire article, visit The Wall Street Journal online.