Resumes Are Sooooo Six Months Ago
A friend of mine recently became a “fan” of Union Square Ventures on Facebook, a New York based tech venture capital firm that has funded the likes of Twitter, Wesabe and Etsy, and home of venture capitalist and blogger, Fred Wilson. I followed the link to their Facebook fan page which then led me to the Union Square Ventures home site.
Much like the lovely redesigned LaunchSquad site, Union Square Ventures puts their blog content front and center — in fact, their blog is the homepage of the site. Something caught my eye: a “We’re Hiring” blog post that asked for potential candidates to put their name, email and link to their web presence, in a blog comment. That’s how you apply.
I found it interesting, and probably increasingly required for tech related jobs, that a web-presence is requested and is basically the only significant and descriptive information in the initial application. Basically, your blog, Facebook page or other online presence IS your resume. Don’t have one? Well you’re probably not right for the job. And if you do have one, it might be time to take those beer-pong-night pictures off the old Facebook photo album.
The more I thought about it, it started to make a lot of sense as a way to whittle down the applicant field. On a blog or social network page a potential employer can easily find some basic pertinent information about someone: Do they write well? Are they analytical? Do they think about things in an interesting way? Are they good networkers? Who have they worked for? I wouldn’t recommend this strategy for, say, a corporate law firm, but for a company that invests in social media and other web-based technologies, it makes perfect sense.
My only criticism of this method, which I think is a big one, is the fact that all applicants are essentially making a public statement, via blog comment, that they are applying for a job. What this means, is that the applicant pool will not include people currently at a job that need to be discreet about their job search — a common occurrence and probably where the best candidates would come from. Who does that leave? People who either don’t care if their job knows (probably not a ton of people and says something about the applicant) and people without jobs. Not sure if that’s necessarily the most fruitful crowd to pull from, but, it seems to have worked for the guys at Union Square Ventures before.
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