Cullmann Design Blog

There are no more resumes. Resumes exist, they certainly serve a purpose to sorting through large amounts of unknown candidates. They can also help an HR department find a possible candidate from an online wholesale list like HotJobs, but they are such a small part of how employers choose the best candidate*. The best candidates are those that come to an employer through a referral or reputation or someone who is recruited to fit a need within a company. This is not to say that those who come to a position by way of their resume are not hard workers or care about what they do. It is saying that resumes are no longer the currency of the hiring process.They say nothing of a person’s brand.

Does this all seem like an invasion of privacy? You may think so, but check your FaceBook settings. Look at how your sharing preferences are set on MySpace or PhotoBucket. Unless you’ve set all these services to be private, you may be living in public.

Controlling your brand. So you’ve have 6 months worth of status updates on Bing. What does this mean to you? To a potential employer? Likely not much, but this is a great opportunity to create BRAND YOU. Begin to use the web and the web of crawlers out there to your advantage. Create a LinkedIn profile, post photos of something you’re passionate about on Flickr, or create a blog for something you feel passionate about. If this all sounds too intimidating–find someone else’s blog that you like and post a comment or ask to contribute. These are all steps to controlling your brand and creating something that represents YOU on the web.

Harnessing BRAND YOU. All too often you hear of the negative aspects of what people find online. There are many more stories of what people find online that get them excited to meet someone. The stories of a freelancer who landed a client because of their online portfolio or tip the scales in favor of someone who has something exciting to say or a has a great blog. When I look at a candidate for a position or someone to work with, sure, I look at their resume, but I always put a majority of my judgement into what they have crafted for themselves online. Do they have a LinkedIn page? What’s on it? Do they have a Blog? A Flickr account? A clip on YouTube? A podcast? Have them commented on someone’s site? Was it funny or insightful? All of these things add up to a profile of that person that means so much more to me than a resume.

Harnessing a person with a brand. People who have a personal brand  are what employers want and need. Those people who have the passion and drive to participate in something they care about-professionally or not–make great employees. Even if those things that drive them are far from the office, you can help them channel their passion into their work and help integrate their dreams into something that will make them well special. Knowing that about your employees will also make you aware of the person behind the employee and hopefully create a relationship that will make you a better manager, employer or mentor.

There are no more resumes. Your online footprint is bigger, better and more engaging than any resume can possibly be. Engage it. Craft it. Make that Google result page something that makes you stand out far beyond the other candidate, co-worker or peer. Most importantly, BRAND YOU something that is your passion and that you can be proud of.

^{*I’m sure that there are many industries that still use resumes as a method for finding, sorting and even hiring candidates, but this post is written in the context of marketing, advertising and branding industries.}

Online identity management is hard even for people who are adept at managing their own SEO/SEM footprint. The ability for the public, friends, colleagues or potential employers to find you (“findability” to reuse the O’Reilly definition) is a mix of art, science and alchemy. Controlling what those searching for you find is the trick.

Google’s newest service, Google Profiles, gives you another way to manage your online presence. Acting as an “official” identity page, Google Profiles is part fill-in-the-blank SEO tool, part social media landing page and part self-promotional web center. Without linking out to any additional services, you can add your bio, a picture and a link to any URL. Results may vary, but if you don’t have much in the way of a web footprint, your Google Profile should be a high-result in a search for your name. For those John Smith’s in the world, I think the task may be more difficult. If you have included a photo, that too will come up in the Google search results page.

In addition to the basic bio, you can add a photo feed from your flickr account, a seemingly infinite list of URLs to sites that house your content, map information, some information about you as well as your contact information. The contact information is governed by a control interface that allows you to choose who can see your information. You can use a “group” architecture, or if you are a Google user, you may use your chat list or e-mail list from gmail or Google Calendar. For those outside of the Google Network, you can turn the contact content on or off based on your preference.

If you already have a network of sites or an online presence, Google Profiles, is an ideal place to put all of your contact information as a spring-board for those who might be looking for you. With geographic information, flickr and room for an many URLs as you care to enter, it puts your empire of content in one place. This is not a replacement for any service or a way to fall flat on your search-engine optimization efforts, but rather another branch out onto the web.

As part of the launch campaign, iPrint has been offering free business-cards with the Google logo and your profile URL printed.

LINKS:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/search-for-me-on-google.html
http://www.google.com/profiles/cullmann