It’s a tough job market out there for college job applicants, and students are looking for anything that can help them stand out from the crowd. While an increasing number of students look to apply to jobs online, the information that might give students a shot at improving their candidacy and landing a job isn’t something they want to share publicly, it’s confidential. As a result, most of this confidential information — whether it be recommendations from professors or expiring job offers — is shared offline.

James Ingallinera and Trey Griffith founded Endorse.me last year to give college jobseekers a secure, online platform through which they can share confidential information with prospective employers, and, in turn, give companies a better way to identify and hire top collegiate talent. Endorse.me is officially launching today at 17 campuses across the U.S., including Stanford, Notre Dame, Cornell, Yale, Harvard, Duke, Dartmouth, UBA, Berkeley and Brown, to name a few, with plans to expand to more colleges in the upcoming academic year.

The fundamental idea behind Endorse.me, Ingallinera tells us, came from his years of experience working in the financial sector. Today, with so many students and recent graduates struggling to find work — and the influx of job applications — the standard, one-page resume is no longer enough. It’s the same philosophy behind services like HireArt and many more.

Ingallinera says that, today, students are looking for ways to stand out in applying for their dream jobs, and to share the kind of information that carries more weight than the standard CV. To do this, students are asked to apply to Endorse.me and, once approved, they can add their resume, recommendations from professors and expiring job offers to their confidential profiles. Students can then create a list of their chosen employers and, after reaching out to professors for recommendations, they can choose the companies with which they share that information.

Endorse.me will then notify those companies of the student’s interest, giving them a complete list of all the students looking to apply to help get their profile information in front of hiring managers. Students can also update their job status on their profile to give employers of interest an opportunity to see interview and job offers they’re receiving — the idea being to allow them to unlock further opportunities once companies see that their competitors are interested.

In turn, students can upload their resume and list the firms they’re interested in, so that they are targeted by them throughout the coming year when new job opportunities arise, regardless of whether the company is actively recruiting at their college.

On the flip side, the more students it attracts, the more value Endorse.me thinks that it can have for employers. Hiring managers can use the platform to view the top-ranked students in their industry, according to their supervisors and professors, which Ingallinera says can be a stronger indicator of on-the-job performance than a one-page resume. By allowing students to express intent and share job offers, Endorse.me allows employers to see where students stand in the hiring process with their competitors, and gain access to and view profiles and resumes year-round.

At launch, the founders tell us, Endorse.me is targeting the financial and technology sectors specifically, but plans to expand its scope in the coming year. That means, at this point, hiring managers from companies like 10gen, Airbnb, Blackstone, Citi, Codecademy, Credit Suisse, Eventbrite, General Catalyst, HubSpot, Indiegogo, Mozilla, Pinterest, Rackspace, Salesforce.com, Spotify, Twitter and Zaarly are currently on Endorse.me and looking for candidates.

Today, Endorse.me is available exclusively as a cloud-based online service, but over the summer, the startup plans to begin developing mobile apps, which it expects to have ready in the fall. The service is currently free for students, employers, and all those intermediaries who choose to write recommendations for students. Again, the service is currently free for employers, but as the startup looks to monetize down the road, it will eventually began charging employers for access to student info.

Endorse.me raised a small round of $300K in seed capital last year, and will look to begin raising its Series A later this fall.

For more, find Endorse.me at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I spent a few hours on the LinkedIn campus a few weeks ago, with the sole mission of learning more about the new LinkedIn profile redesign. It was quite a shift from its previous iteration, and instead of just letting the regular news cycle and announcement go without further detail, I wanted to actually spend time with the people who put their ideas, blood, sweat and tears into the project.

As you might know, something like this isn’t easy, especially when you have as many users as LinkedIn does. Not only that, but there are many different types of LinkedIn users who are on the site for a slew of reasons: people looking to connect, people looking for a job and recruiters looking for talent. How do you design and redesign one site to make all of those people happy? That’s what I set out to learn.

When I spoke with Aaron Bronzan, the senior product manager for profiles, a feature that the company calls its “core,” he seemed extremely happy with his team’s work. Of course, that’s because he’s the man who gets to look at the analytics on how they’re performing every day.

More importantly than how the redesign was done for profiles, I wanted to know the why’s. Bronzan told me: “We’re still learning a lot from the new design and it’s an iterative process. After three years at LinkedIn, I’ve always worked on profile. Simplifying it has been our focus for the past year, streamlining so that someone can get a quick sense of who you are when they visit your profile.”

When you visit the new profile designs, you can see how much the company values the data that is placed within their databases. After all, LinkedIn is the next-generation résumé, something that can and should be constantly updated as your career evolves, whether you’re between jobs or not.

Data, Data, Data

The most important part of the new profiles is how much information surfaces without taking up a lot of room. You can quickly see how you’re connected to someone and what and whom you have in common with them. But when is data and information simply “too much” to consume for casual profile visitors? That’s a slippery slope that Bronzan and his team deal with on a daily basis.

Before we get to the type of data that LinkedIn profiles show, what about how the company chose it and how it becomes relevant for all of the types of users it has. Bronzan shared this with me on the topic and how the team decides what to tweak and what to leave alone:

We have many professionals who use LinkedIn profile as part of a job every day, or to find new opportunities. A segment of them are very vocal in giving feedback. The other place we get this inspiration and understanding our use cases and we see trends where people can find something or click. Seeing gaps leads us along with what we hear, guides and influences what we’re trying to do.

Keeping It Fresh

When I surf LinkedIn profiles, it becomes painfully obvious that people don’t really update it with relevant information about them. For example, their bio will say that they have “three years of experience” with something, yet their current job has covered a span of four years. Much like a résumé, it’s a good idea to keep going back to it and adding all of the things you’re doing. Bronzan helped build the new profiles to suit this methodology:

There’s a lot of utility in keeping your identity fresh and up to date, you have particular accomplishments in your day to day job. Documenting them is a really great way along the way. If you’re a keeping up to date and keeping your profile fresh, when it comes to a pivot to a new opportunity, the hope is that your profile can do that work for you.

While it’s not just about managing your profile to get a new job, it’s important to keep your connections up to date on what you’re doing, too. Bronzan tells me that it placed new focus on things like skills and expertise, by adding a graphical wizard that sits on top of your profile when you visit it. The addition of groups you belong to also shows off your interests to others, so that they can ping you when they have a question on a specific topic, like HTML5 design for example.

The Next-Generation Résumé

As we start placing all of our information into digital databases spread all over the web, our career information needs a place. I still have friends who send me their résumé via Google Docs and I sit there and wonder “Why would anyone want to manage a flat and unsocial document like this?” That’s why I’m so interested in what LinkedIn has been doing as a company.

During our chat, Bronzan told me:

We’ve taken the concept of the résumé and taken it beyond what jobs you’ve had and brought in new sections that can help you represent that on an ongoing basis. I can enter in “projects” that I’m working on. It really is a living and breathing way of showing what I’m doing on a daily basis. I can then attach these projects with people I’m connected to on LinkedIn.

The nice part about the new profiles that not many people notice is that the information that you’re shown for someone changes on the fly, based on where you came from on the site. The paths you take make the content contextually relevant, so you don’t need a “recruiter” view or a “job hunting” view. LinkedIn has a pretty good idea of what you’re up to and serves up the information accordingly.

The modules on the new profile are swapped in and out without anyone noticing, giving that relevant information that I mentioned. Bronzan tells me that over time, LinkedIn will subtly become even more relevant for users, pushing along the “not one size fits all” beliefs.

The future

The key for LinkedIn to remain relevant in professional circles moving forward will be to appeal to a younger audience. Students in college, and even high school, should totally start using the site. For me, I never found it more useful until I started moving all around the country. I was able to connect for jobs, to ask questions about neighborhoods and get the answers from people that I trusted.

The younger generation isn’t thinking that far yet, but Bronzan believes it should:

We can recognize or find signals that you’re a student and a young professional or worked in one place for 10 years. We try to find ways to showcase your identity. Projects, test scores, course work, honors and awards. That’s where the younger crowd can start.

Connecting with classmates and professors is just as important as connecting with someone who works at a company you’d like to work for. LinkedIn needs to do a better job of bridging the gap between Facebook and its service. There has to be a better onboarding process to pull your social graph from Facebook and request connections on LinkedIn. Bronzan recognizes that.

There is also a huge opportunity for continuing education. As LinkedIn knows exactly who you are, where you went to school, what degrees you finished or didn’t, it is in a great position to display potential opportunities for you to go back to school. Since you can view job opportunities on the site, LinkedIn could suggest relevant courses to make sure you can get noticed for the job.

When it comes to the future, you might not want to think of LinkedIn as a “professional social network,” since it sounds kind of boring and lame. Bronzan shared his thoughts on how to describe the service:

It starts with your identity. People are looking for you and your opportunity to put your best foot forward is to frame your accomplishments. Building out your profile and network can help you out with that and build your professional footprint on the web.

Once you’ve established your identity, LinkedIn helps you grow and build out your network. It’s effective and useful for you. People to come to LinkedIn to find people.

Finding people is something everyone is trying to do. What LinkedIn does is help you find the right people in the right situation. Next time, we’ll talk about how the new profiles came to be, from the people who helped design and build them.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Startup Bright has already built a popular job board. CEO Steve Goodman says that over the past 18 months, Bright.com has attracted 8.6 million job seekers who have posted 2.8 million resumes. However, that was just stage one of the company’s plans — in Goodman’s words, it was “the largest scientific resume trial in the history of the industry.” Now Bright has collected a lot of data about what works and what doesn’t in the job search, and it’s ready to put those findings to use.

Here’s the problem, as laid out by Goodman: The Internet has democratized the job application process, and that’s not entirely a good thing. Since it’s much easier to find and apply for jobs, companies and especially recruiters are now being bombarded with resumes. In many cases, the final decision is going to be based on one-on-one interviews, but winnowing down a giant stack of resumes to those final 20 or 10 or five candidates to interview can be a challenge.

That’s where Bright comes in — specifically, a new tool called the Bright Score. Goodman says that during the 18-month trial, more than 100 talent recruiters were rating the appropriateness of tens of thousands of applications for different jobs. Then Bright’s 15 data scientists and engineers looked at those results, as well as other activity on the site, to create a generalized scoring algorithm. In other words, the Bright Score assesses how well-suited you are for a certain job. If you score between 100 and 90, you’re an exceptional fit. If you score between 89 and 80, you’re a great fit. If you score less than 70, you’re not qualified.

Goodman says this scoring mechanism goes beyond simple keyword matching: Even if your resume includes the word “sales” dozens of times, Bright shouldn’t recommend you for a sales job that’s in a completely different field. He also says that Bright looks at a lot of the factors that turned out to be important to recruiters, but aren’t necessarily apparent on a quick glance at the resume — things like grammar, social connections, and whether an applicant worked at a competing company.

Once people have been scored, Goodman says Bright works at “taking the search out of job search.” If you’re a job applicant, the site can recommend jobs that seem like a good fit (i.e., jobs where you have a high Bright Score). If you’re a recruiter, you can look at the Bright Score of everyone who’s applied, and invest most of your time on the applicants with the highest scores. You can also look at an anonymized list of Bright Scores for prospects, meaning people who looked at your listing but didn’t apply. Posting a listing is free, but if you want to unlock the name and contact info of a prospect, you’ll have to pay.

Bright has already the overcome the chicken-and-egg problem of some job boards — it doesn’t have to juggle attracting applicants and recruiters, but it already has a significant user base of both. At the same time, Goodman says he wants Bright to go broader than its own website, possibly by partnering with other hiring products like Taleo and Jobvite. The real goal, he says (and he admits this is “grandiose”) is to become the “de facto standard” that someone is judged by whenever they apply for a job.

The company is also announcing that it has raised a $6 million Series A from undisclosed angel investors.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

What’s the penalty for lying on a resume? It’s an important question for new Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson, after his PR department offered up the laughable excuse that he made “an inadvertent error” on Yahoo’s website and in an SEC filing claiming he had a Computer Science degree. TechCrunch editor Eric Eldon just wrote this should cost him his new job. At Yahoo, the penalty could include “immediate discharge.”

I got a job at Yahoo in 1999. Before I started, I was required to fill out an Employment Application. The form included educational and employment history information and notes “A resume may be attached.” At the bottom of the form, there is a boxed section, with the bold headline “Authorization: Please read carefully, initial each paragraph and sign below.”

Here’s the first paragraph in that section:

“I certify that the facts on this Employment Application (and any supplements attached) are true and complete. I further understand that any omissions or misrepresentations made by me on this application will be sufficient grounds for denying my application, withdrawing any offer of employment or immediate discharge.”

So, if I had made ANY misrepresentations (in Yahoo PR speak: inadvertent errors) as a Yahoo employee, I would have been at risk of losing my job immediately. We’ll find out of the same rules apply to the CEO.

Some caveats here of course. This application is more than 10 years old and Yahoo might have changed this part. Unlikely. Also, Thompson’s employment application (if he even wrote one) and his contract are not part of the public record, so we don’t know exactly what’s in there.

We do know what’s in documents Yahoo filed with the SEC where the false degree was also mentioned. As activist shareholder Daniel Loeb noted in his letter to the Board, Yahoo’s Code of Ethics may have been violated. It states “Disclosure in reports and documents filed with or submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commision, and in other public communications made by Yahoo! must be full, fair, accurate, timely and understandable.”

Update: Michael Arrington, who is now CEO of Yahoo according to his LinkedIn profile, just reported Yahoo even has a 24-hour IntegrityLine to report Code of Ethics violations. Mike says he called the number “and damn if they don’t pick that phone up on the first ring.” I tried calling the number and all I get is some peaceful on hold music and a message “Thank you for holding.” Seems that line might be pretty busy right now.

Perhaps, Thompson should have read this article, found ironically on Yahoo Voices titled “3 Reasons You Should Never Lie on Your Resume.” It ends with the following suggestion on why its not a good idea. “In the end, you’ll be happier for not having to look over your shoulder for the rest of your career, just wondering if, right now, someone is calling that bogus school you mentioned last year when you finally got your dream job.”

[Image: alexskopje/Shutterstock]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Chris Rickborn is the COO and co-founder of Unrabble, a hiring software solution for small- to medium-sized businesses, especially startups. You can follow Unrabble at @unrabble.

I was recently going through an old banker’s box that I packed up years ago while I was cleaning out my office. There was a Palm Pilot, a mini cassette recorder, and even a stack of floppy disks. It was like a time capsule of obsolete technology. All I needed were a few Polaroid pictures and a beeper to make my time travel complete. In one of the file folders, I found about a dozen resumes that I had wanted to keep and in another there was a bunch of printed product brochures from various vendors.

Every gadget I found in that box had evolved or been replaced by some new innovation. Even the non-gadgets like printed product brochures have been replaced by websites that can present information in much richer context. Only the folder of resumes stood out as the unchanged medium.

It baffles me how the lifecycle of so many products and business processes can be extremely short and are so easily disrupted by innovation, yet an individual’s resume is still a one or two page document.  It’s still typed out in the same format it was 30 years ago and then printed, emailed or uploaded.

Maybe the answer is that the change is actually underway but we just don’t realize it’s happening. The reality is that the cloud is killing the resume and, for the most part, it’s going unnoticed.  As more and more of us place our trust in cloud-based services to manage our lives or interact via social media, that information will ultimately be cultivated and harnessed to replace your resume.

There’s no doubt that prospective employers compare the information on your current resume to all the other facts about you floating in the cloud, just as it’s inevitable that your resume will ultimately be replaced by an online profile.  Sites like LinkedIn, BeKnown and BranchOut are already way down that path of on-line profiles that connect you to job opportunities without requiring a paper resume to start, while sites like About.me seem to be going for the cover letter. Meanwhile, Vizualize.me and Re.vu offer infographic-style representations of your career biography.

Shifting from a traditional resume to an on-line profile presents a huge opportunity for improving the hiring process for both the candidate and employer. Candidates can provide a much more comprehensive view of their skills, potential and accomplishments while employers can avoid getting swayed by clever resume writing or overlook qualified candidates in a haze of sameness. Profiles represent a massive gain in connecting the right candidates to employers in ways that could have never happened with a traditional resume.

The resume of the future should enable candidates to tell their story without the limitations of a plain text document. Profiles will be an interactive experience with rich content that should adapt and dynamically direct viewers to relevant skills, strengths and accomplishments based on the viewers needs.  Candidates should be able to control access to their information and analyze how visitors interact with their profile the same way traffic is analyzed on a website. The resume of the future should also be a connection point between company and candidate that will greatly reduce the manual burden of pre-screening.  Interactive profiles should facilitate communication and collaboration between hiring manager, candidate and other stakeholders so that hiring decisions can be made quickly and effectively.

But before you throw resumes into the shredder, there are big challenges to overcome such as privacy and basic behavioral change.  I was recently helping a friend review job applicants through LinkedIn and noticed that almost every applicant still attached a resume.  If you have a profile on LinkedIn, why would you attach a resume?  In many cases, the information in the resume was much more in-depth than what was on the candidate’s profile.

I think this indicates a few realities.  First, candidates still want to customize their resume for each job opportunity. Second, candidates are reluctant to put all of their career details in a public profile where they might lose control of the information. And third, most employers still require a resume. Otherwise, their legacy hiring process just breaks down.

According to USA Today, nearly 35 percent of resumes contain blatant lies about education, experience or the skills to perform a specific job. That’s why online profiles are better. It’s much harder for candidates to stretch the truth in an on-line profile because they risk getting caught whereas a resume is only between candidate and employer.

Being more open and honest in an on-line profile that is shared privately with a prospective employer is certainly the way forward. But there are more reasons why the cloud offers greater advantages over a traditional paper resume, such as:

1) Facilitates better collaboration.  Instead of scribbling notes on a paper resume, and asking colleagues to review a stack of resumes, the cloud offers colleagues the opportunity to discretely rate and review candidates on-line after they’ve submitted an on-line application for a job opening. The ratings and reviews gathered through on-line collaboration can give employers a much better consensus of how strong or weak each candidate is.

2) Follows you, wherever you go.  A stack of paper resumes sitting on your office desk with notes scribbled on them to indicate the best candidates isn’t going to help much when you’re on the road traveling or working from home. With the cloud, wherever you have an Internet connection, you have instant access to a “central repository” of on-line job applications, as well as the notes you’ve added into an on-line comments field.

3) Greater cost efficiencies.  The cost and time-saving benefits of a cloud computing solution far outweighs the current hiring process that has one hand tied behind its back because of the paper resume. Taking the hiring process to the cloud and allowing candidates to apply for jobs with on-line profiles can transform the speed and efficiency of the hiring process. The profiles can be reviewed, shared and rated with far greater ease, thereby dramatically decreasing the amount of time it takes to hire qualified candidates.

These are just a few of the reasons why the cloud will kill the traditional resume. There’s no doubt that killing the text-based resume will generate a huge opportunity for improving the hiring process for both the candidate and employer.  But just like everything else in that dusty old banker’s box, the resume served us well in its heyday. And now it’s time to move on.

[image via flickr/bpsusf]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch