Skip to content
Technology & Innovation —

Your Online Presence Is Your Résumé

Businesses are increasingly turning to social networking sites to filter job applicants and get a more transparent assessment of prospective employees’ strengths and weaknesses.
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

What’s the Latest Development?

Businesses are innovating at the level of hiring, using social networks to screen job applicants. Large companies like SAP build their own community sites where prospective employees interact by writing and responding to blog posts and interacting in online forums. Applicants can also upload videos and test their ideas in a field of their peers. Many computer programmers build profiles on GitHub, a networking site which allows people to showcase their code-writing abilities, demonstrating their enthusiasm to employers who follow the site.

What’s the Big Idea?

The paper résumé is becoming a relic. LinkedIn profiles are becoming a more important indication of how much experience one has in a given field and, obviously, how connected a person is. The emphasis on new technology gives younger generations an edge thanks to their know-how and their comfort with sharing their lives online. For some, it is proving a boon: “A strong online reputation is allowing some job seekers with limited qualifications to skip over the dues-paying phase of their career and move directly into a higher-level position.”

Photo credit: shutterstock.com

Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.
Related
Guest Thinkers
Delete Your Résumé, Friend Your Boss
45% of employers use social networks to research applicants. Whether you’re a god of the Twitterverse or happier with a pen in hand, your career is now linked to the digital landscape. Will reputations be made or broken on the web?
Guest Thinkers
Happy New Year
It’s plain to see that I’m an optimist, sometimes more than is socially comfortable. The ease with which I dismiss the disastrous economic decline above serves as one example of that. I wrote that the recession will benefit our political system, and, before I cut this line, as having “rewarded our company for methodical execution and ruthless efficiency by removing competitors from the landscape.” I make no mention of the disastrous effects on millions of people, and the great uncertainty that grips any well-briefed mind, because it truly doesn’t stand in the foreground of my mind (despite suffering personal loss of wealth). Our species is running towards a precipice with looming dangers like economic decline, political unrest, climate crisis, and more threatening to grip us as we jump off the edge, but my optimism is stronger now than ever before. On the other side of that looming gap are extraordinary breakthroughs in healthcare, communications technology, access to space, human productivity, artistic creation and literally hundreds of fields. With the right execution and a little bit of luck we’ll all live to see these breakthroughs — and members of my generation will live to see dramatically lengthened life-spans, exploration and colonization of space, and more opportunity than ever to work for passion instead of simply working for pay. Instead of taking this space to regale you with the many personal and focused changes I intend to make in 2009, let me rather encourage you to spend time this year thinking, as I’m going to, more about what we can do in 2009 to positively affect the future our culture will face in 2020, 2050, 3000 and beyond.
Up Next