September is back to school time, and also a good time to update your online resume and credentials. While a new Facebook app from Brazen Careerist is more about the eye candy than anything, there are a few nuggets of utility that are worth reviewing as you attempt to better market yourself and re-invigorate your job search.
We all know that it isn’t just about scanning Craigslist posts to find a job: part of the process is being able to put down all your skills and previous experiences in a way that will elicit a response from a potential future employer. And part of that is doing some careful soul-searching, reviewing your last resume, and keeping up to date what you have down in your LinkedIn and Facebook and other online profiles as your work experience changes, or as you recall things that you omitted the last time you went through this exercise.
I have done dozens of training seminars for potential job seekers over the past several years, and one thing that I emphasize repeatedly is that you need to do these reviews and updates on a regular basis. If you are currently unemployed, it should be weekly. Otherwise, monthly is fine. I have had a Linked In account for many years, and I still find annoying typos and mistakes and omissions every time I go back and edit my profile. It is just human nature: we aren’t good at copy editing ourselves, and we tend to forget significant events, people, and work moments as we are staring at the screen trying to recall what was that big report that I worked on back in 2003?
So enter Brazen Careerist. The company offers a variety of helpful tools, videos and online events primarily for Gen Y’ers looking for employment. We last wrote about them last November. I have not used any of their other tools besides the new Facebook app, which was announced today.
So after you link the app to your Facebook account, the next thing you’ll need to do is link it to your LinkedIn account. It then assembles a visual “infographic” style resume that is more flash than substance. For example, you get this map of your connections (I don’t know what that dot is just south of Maine, I don’t think I have a cluster of lobster fishermen or whatever that is out there in the ocean).
There is also a listing of keywords for your skills that it culls from your job descriptions. Now I am notoriously bad at figuring this out, so one asset for the Brazen app is that it just did this for me. I can now go back into LinkedIn, and update its recently added skills section for my profile. Yeah! (You do know that the skills section is the single most-important part of your resume and something that should be placed at the very top, right?)
The other interesting part of the app is its badges display, as you can see below. I got 11 out of the 24 possible badges, and some of them are obvious – I know a lot of CEOs, so the CEO in training badge makes sense. But others are just plain wrong: as an avid reader, I just don’t have time to list all the books that I read online, or indeed any of them. So the “book nerd” badge isn’t lit up yet. Still, this got me thinking about how I can better show my talents and tweak my profile. And even though it is a Facebook app, most of the data points it is using (at least for me) are from my LinkedIn account. And no, there isn’t any badge for the number of pictures of you with red plastic cups in your hands.
There are other social networking aspects of Brazen that I don’t think will catch on: do we really need another social networking app to invite friends and follow others? I don’t think so. But if you can use the app to help you spruce up your LinkedIn profile, that is a big plus. The app is free and it will take just a few minutes to see the kind of results that I show here.
