Job Search Technology for LinkedIn

LinkedIn is now growing at 7500 MPH.  That’s Members Per Hour.   Speed like that, is really powerful, but speed can also kill, so be careful. 

Below we examine several pieces of job search technology that are applicable to LinkedIn.

1.      Card Munch

 Card Munch is an App that scans business cards through I phones and turns that business card into a contact and shows you that individual’s LinkedIn profile, their credentials, as well as the contacts that you have in common. The output creates a “rolodex” of business cards matched to LinkedIn profiles.  One of the greatest features here is you now not only have a connections profile email address, but their primary business email.

 2.      LinkedIn Resume Builder and/or Visualize.me

The power of presentation is often not fully embraced in the job search process. A classic chronological resume or Linkedin profile often does not capture your story and message.  Lots of career promotions, parallel roles/positions or concentrated company movement can get very confusing for a reader to interpret.  The Linkedin resume builder and Visualize.me, both try to tackle this problem, but from very different angles.

LinkedIn’s resume builder is essentially a formatting tool that attempts to capture your profile then, re-tag and structure it into a quality well formatted resume. The tool certainly grabs the content, but its ability to understand the content and properly structure it is limited. This problem is heavily exasbarated if you have customized your LinekdIn profile.  If your profile is brief and straightforward, the application has much greater utility and does save re-keying time.  That said, while LinkedIn allows very limiting structural creativity within an individual’s profile, aresume building tool can actually provide a myriad of opportunities for more creative layouts, descriptions of roles and accomplishments.

Visualize.me takes the process further by attempting to take your LinkedIn profile and turn it into a timeline Infographic. Conceptually this is really powerful and helpful.  If your data is straight forward, it provides a great visual representation of your experience, education, skills, interests, and recommendations.   The key to the tool is to then invest 30 minutes cleaning up your Infographic information and the application also allows for plenty of presentation options around color, font, theme etc..  Like LinkedIn’s resume builder, the more straight forward your chronological job history, the better the tool performs.

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