Five years ago, hunting for a job meant buying fancy paper at the office supply store, formatting your resume carefully using a word processor, and mailing your carefully-prepared documents to prospective employers. Today, many employers want job seekers to skip the postage stamp and email your resume. At the same time, phone calls are less frequent, and there’s less personal contact between employers and their potential employees. In today’s competitive job market, the more personal differentiation and evidence of your skills you can include, the better.
Visual CV helps you add a memorable touch to your resume or curriculum vitae (CV) – not only helping you format the content digitally but providing the tools to include bells and whistles to make you stand out in the crowd. When you create your Visual CV, you’re creating a multimedia resume that can include audio and video, as well as a digital portfolio of your work. You can share your resume with the world, with a select group of people for networking, or keep it private until you’re ready to send it to an interested employer. Your resume will show more about who you are and what you can do for an employer; in other words, it’s You 2.0.
Practical Uses:
- Enhance and personalize your resume to include evidence of your past work, published articles, references, and materials that would be cumbersome to include in a physical portfolio
- Send your formatted resume digitally via pdf to potential employers
- Not looking for work? Create a Visual CV as a professional biography for clients, company promotion, or networking
Insider Tips:
- Take time to adjust your privacy settings to ensure that you’re sharing each CV (and the knowledge that you’re job hunting) only with those you want
- Traditional resumes often include personal data like home address and phone numbers. In most cases, you’ll want to limit this information on your Visual CV
- To prepare the best possible CV, take a look at the site’s “Insider’s Guide” for tips on writing your resume
- Try including a biography section, a list of latest ventures, or a section titled “see me in action”
- Look through example CVs to inspire your creativity
What we liked:
- The system is easy to use, even for novices
- Visual CV allows users to add graphs, charts, audio files, published articles, and other data to a resume
- The site makes it easy to share your resume digitally, as a pdf attachment or within Visual CV
- Users are allowed to create different resumes for different audiences
- Visual CV’s forum provides opportunities to network within the website
What we didn’t like:
- Copying and pasting from Microsoft Word into Visual CV can lead to formatting problems
- Many of the resumes created in Visual CV include a photo of the job applicant. As workers outside the US know, this can lead to discrimination based on race, gender, age, or looks
Alternatives:
Company Info:
- Launched: February 11, 2008
- Privately Owned
- Headquarters: Reston, VA
- Founded by Clint F. Heiden and Phillip Merrick
- Web site: http://www.visualcv.com
Costs:
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