Job Seeking 2.0: Interactive Self-Branding

Social media is penetrating to all corners of life, including job seeking. Today, a plain CV may not be your only choice when you get down to introducing yourselves to prospective employers. With web sites such as VirtualCV and Ning, job seekers are able to provide richer information such as self-introduction videos, hyperlinks to references, images, charts, and other portfolio documents. (Please go here to take a look at a sample VirtualCV resume.) These web sites also provide networking resources to interact with employers, and users can control who has access to view their online resumes.

One important idea underlying these web sites is self-branding- instead of telling what they can do (in plain text), job seekers now showcase what's been done in order to demonstrate what they can do. The technologies enable job seekers to tell stories, make presentations, and draw pictures of themselves for potential employers, giving them a clearer feel of the "persona". Another big plus about these web sites is that it will help improve your Google ranking, adding more weight to your personal brand.

With almost all technologies being double-edged swords, it can be argued that VirtualCV and Ning have potential down sides for job seekers and their self-branding. In my opinion, disadvantages may include- information overload, challenges of branding with multimedia (for example, people need to know how to speak properly in front of a camera in order to make a good self-introduction video), keeping a balance between being completely open with one's online resume and being highly selectively open (after all, you don't want to be transparent to everyone with your professional information, and at the same time, you do need to direct useful traffic to view it). I'm curious to know your opinions about online job seeking, self-branding and pros and cons of these web sites.