I was working on my resume today when I had a couple of ideas that might be worth following up on.
The first was about XML resumes: it's actually faster for me to nicely format my resume in XHTML (with a stylesheet) rather than fighting with MS Word or some other program. Some quick searching turned up a handful of good options, which are links organized underneath this page.
The second idea is about resume promotion. This kind of ties in to Search Engine Optimization (a search for my name has my main website first, and my resume second) and a bunch of blog promotion advertising stuff. Well, or advertising in general.
What if, just like Google Ads or Blogsnob, you could "advertise" your resume all over the place? I'm not clear on the entire structure, but essentially you could push your resume to relevant content all over the place.
There's a tie-in to social software here, as well. You could certainly link to/list friends, previous managers, previous companies, etc. A site like PromoteMyResume.com could be used as a central directory or search tool, and you could also link in external stuff. Hmmm...filter by "previously employed by company X" and other stuff like that.
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Disincentive
Well, isn't it precisely what a candidate will not want to have: his or her CV put in the close vicinity of direct competitors?
Yes, you are right -- you are
Yes, you are right -- you are unlikely to link to someone with the exact same skillset as you. The links will be between friends or business colleagues, where there is probably not a direct overlap in skills.
standards and then security
I've looked into this one before as well. Seems that several large companies got together with the utopian ideal of create a standardized data exchange format in HR XML. For some reason (too many cooks), though, the standard has completely hit a dead end. It's needlessly complex, and almost no one has made practical applications of it.
The home brewed open source XML Resume is actually far more useful and practical than anything else available.
On the other hand, I've heard that one of the biggest sources of identity theft comes from the data available in a resume that has been posted online.
You're right. There is an application waiting to be developed here. Perhaps an online, searchable resume hub - with an anonymizing interface to protect sensitive user information.
ds
The XML Resume format looks g
The XML Resume format looks great. Getting it to run means 1) having a full commandline interface (only) and 2) having 10 years of experience as a Senior Java Engineer.
(yes, that means I didn't even get it to run -- I'll fight with it some more another day)
Instead of a hub, I was thinking a more decentralized model -- everyone can host their resume on their own site, with a sign-up to a system that allows you to display links to your resume on sites of other people that are trying to do the same thing -- "if you liked Joe's resume, you might also like Jane's". The social software stuff in there is gravy, although it might be used to protect identity.
Got it working
My biggest frustration was the lack of documentation and the seeming reliance on nightly jobs. I've set up a php page that autocombines the xsl and the latest version of the resume.
If you need any help, you can check out my implementation or give me a holler. Good luck!
I had a similar ideas after s
I had a similar ideas after seeing xmlresume at sourceforge, but I also was unable to get it fully working. I got everything working except for the PDF generation, which would be cool, but I may not need anyway.
I'm interested in making a more easily distributable package, so people didn't have to go through all the guesswork I had to with the lack of documentation.