If you’re looking for work, whether a full-time position or a series of gigs, sooner or later you’ll need to send in a copy of your resume. This simple request can be the cause of a surprising number of problems. Depending on what type of software you used to write your resume, you may find that a prospective employer can’t open it, winds up with a corrupted copy or refuses to take the chance of opening a file that might contain a virus. One of the easiest solutions to these problems is posting your resume online and simply sending your prospective employer a link.
CeeVee simplifies the process of posting your resume online. The team behind CeeVee is working on developing more tools that will help employers and employees connect, but the minimalist approach to resume-building taken with CeeVee makes it a particularly useful tool. Read the rest of this entry »
A little while ago, I took a look at a new job search/resumé posting website called Raveal. It billed itself as the next big thing in online career finding, but I wasn’t totally convinced it was much different than its predecessors Monster.com or Workopolis.
Flowz, the developer behind Raveal, has since introduced a variety of new features to try to up the game of the fledgling web site. Some of these are little more than aesthetic upgrades, but some are substantial improvements that really change the way the site works at its core. Read the rest of this entry »
photo by woodleywonderworks
If you’re a freelancer, making a great first impression with clients is vital. Here are some of my tips for making sure that first impression is a good one.
Like many other freelancers, I dread hearing these words from a potential client: “Can you send me a copy of your resume?” Resumes will never be a great way for me to showcase my work, and I don’t think they make a great first impression. They also seem a little old-fashioned for those of us who work almost entirely online. My body of work is online, and that says so much more about me than I could possibly cram onto a one- or two-page resume. However, many people still ask for a resume, and you have to be prepared to send one to potential clients or employers. If you’re preparing an “old school” resume, FreelanceSwitch has some good tips. Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve all probably used either Monster.com or Workopolis.com at some point. Whether or not we did so successfully or enjoyed the process is another story. Looking for work online can feel clumsy, impersonal and of questionable effectiveness. Even professional networking apps like LinkedIn haven’t really made significant advances to the way we go about searching for jobs on the web. A new service, called Raveal, hopes to bring some fresh perspective to the online employment search game.
Raveal is aimed at the job hunter, promising to represent those who list themselves with the service as people, not assets. It’s an attractive prospect when you’re coming from a situation where you feel significantly less than human in the meat market that is Monster. And it has a distinctly simple, clean Web 2.0 look that at least shows the site’s designers take their job seriously. Read the rest of this entry »
A big chunk of web working has to do with managing your online presence. That means staying on top of social media trends, managing Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other profiles, and making sure all these communities are working to your advantage. A well-managed online presence could mean a Digg front-page one day, and a well-placed link another, generating a lot of traffic and interest in whatever service/product you may be selling.
It’s surprising, then that people so often overlook the value of a personal blog in the social media web.
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As a web worker, you likely gave up sending out paper resumes long ago. But is the online profile that you show prospective employers anything more than a marked-up copy of that old version? If so, VisualCV wants to help you bring that hoary old document into the web age. After a free registration, you can create your VisualCV, you end up in the company’s browser-based editor. Here you can add and edit typical sections like “Objective”, “Work History”, and “Education” to your CV.
But things don’t stop there. What makes VisualCV stand out is the variety of content that you can add to areas like the Portfolio sidebar. Web sites you’re proud of creating? Put up screenshots. Video or audio recordings to show off your people skills? Put those in too. The end result is somewhere between a traditional resume and a single-page portfolio web site. VisualCV also offers you control over who can see your work, and lets you create multiple versions to put forth a different persona to different readers. Best of all, it’s all free.
Some employers don’t place a lot of credence on traditional resumes: even a completely truthful resume 
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
