Why Do You Have a Resume?

Image by Olivier Charavel via FlickrThat’s not a trick question. In an age when everyone uses the Internet to bring up search engines and try to discover quick-and-dirty facts about you, why condense your online persona to a sheet or two of paper?

If you trace the etymology of the 1804 French word, résumé, it stems from the past participle of résumer, which in English means to resume or to summarize.

I don’t know about you, but I’d like to think my experiences, skills, and educational background are part of a running commentary on who I am today, how I improve myself, and where I am in my life, not a static summary of my past.

In the social media space where I live and work, I want to save you unnecessary time and effort to find me. You obviously found my blog at ariwriter.com and maybe you saw me on other social networks, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, or Del.icio.us. Have you Googled me?

Go ahead and click this link to Google me. I know what you’ll see. I also know what you’ll see on any social network, whether you want pictures or controversial stories I’ve written.

In this vein, where’s the value in my sending you a resume of “who I was” and not what I can contribute to your organization? Pictures speak 1,000 words so rather than seeing a drab and boring black font on white stock traditional resume that everyone and his brother sends you, wouldn’t you rather see interactive content, splashy images, and the ability to email me with the click of a button?

If you want to see my resume, it will stick out like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

Before I continue, let me step back. I’ve written at length about LinkedIn, a professional networking tool that is capable of lead generation, personal branding, and building your online reputation.

LinkedIn is where I connect with industry peers whether one-on-one or in virtual group settings. For instance, I’ve lately used a Q&A feature to engage with the global LinkedIn community, asking questions about subjects I know little about; and answering questions where I’m an expert.

While I previously used LinkedIn as a virtual duplication of my traditional resume and sent both structures to prospective employers, I wanted something more. I wanted more control.

Enter VisualCV

Unlike my LinkedIn profile and the look of stereotypical resumes, my graphical resume is more dynamic:

It looks like my blog’s layout, no? There are sidebar widgets, splashy pictures, and hyperlinked content. And that’s just the beginning.

Kim Haynes of Bulldog Solutions initially told me about the site in a Twitter message about eight weeks ago; and more recently, I corresponded with Kristi Colvin who is evangelizing for the start-up.

As I develop my social media consulting business in the coming weeks, I’ll be fine tuning my online resume to make it both splashier and more representative of who I am and what I’m doing in the social media world. In a phrase, I’m commoditizing myself. Shouldn’t you, too?

I can’t force you to visit me at VisualCV, no more than I push you to write a comment below. But if you are also tired of the drab and want to stick out from everyone else, consider joining me and about 50,000 other global users of the VisualCV software as a service and transform your meaningless one-dimensional resume into a 3-D visual representation of who you are.

Related posts:

1. 12 Ways to Use LinkedIn Today
2. LinkedIn MySpace Facebook Twitter Time
3. How a Blog Post Could Go Viral

Tagged as: LinkedIn

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