Interviewing for jobs is downright tedious. Depending on whom you ask, the answer will range from boring to annoying. It’s just not the pressure to do better in an interview. Thanks to a lousy economy, these days getting shortlisted for a job in itself is a pain. One has to do a lot of things differently to stand out from the rest of the crowd.
Resumes still rule the roost as a critical tool to stand out. And, you can’t have only one version of your resume either. Startups and small companies tend to prefer a one pager rather than the regular one. Enterprises tend to trash any resume that is less than two pages. All in all, it’s a very delicate balancing act that needs maximum attention.
Few web apps have tried their hand at tackling the problem, but there isn’t a clear winner yet. I came across a Jobrary resume even before taking up this app for a review and liked what I saw. Could this one be the winner?
Getting Started
Without much fuss, Jobrary takes you straight to the resume creation page. Predictably, the resume creation page is a bunch of form fields and text boxes. The neatly organized sections and super sized form fields make filling out a ton of data quite a bit of fun. Without going into all the boring details, let me skip ahead to the interesting bits.
Creating a Resume and Toggling Visibility Settings
By default, the visibility of your resume is set to public. This can be changed quickly by using the toggle button at the top right corner or the radio buttons in the form. Keeping the visibility status of the resume private by default would have been perfect though. However, for those who are concerned about their privacy, you won’t be able miss or forget changing the visibility options.
City and country info have their own dedicated fields along with website and phone information. And, you can easily add multiple website and phone numbers to the resume. Strangely, there isn’t a section for adding the communication or postal address.
Adding a Work Experience Section with relevant details
You can stack up multiple sections to comprehensively showcase your various degrees, certifications and work experiences. Ensure that you save the details entered in each section. Instead of saving the multiple sections individually, it would be productive if there was a universal save button at the end of the page.
Creating Custom Sections
Creating a Custom Section
Custom sections bring in a lot of flexibility. Four different types of custom sections are up for addition to your resume – skills, certifications, references and custom. I guess the titles of the sections are self explanatory and all of them have form fields customized for that particular section. The ominously named custom section is a text box which could be put use to highlight your hobbies or achievements in your life.
Spicing Things Up
Feeling a bit adventurous? Then, you might want to go the extra mile by thinking out of the box and add some multimedia content to your portfolio. Not every HR manager is a fan of such revolutionary measures, but is definitely worth a try. To add content to your portfolio, create a new gallery in your Portfolio page.
A Porfolio Gallery with Images and YouTube Video
Adding images to the gallery is bound to help web designers, fashion designers, architects and pretty much everyone whose job revolves around design that can be captured in a screenshot or image file. On the other hand, videos stick out like a sore thumb. The scope of using videos in a gallery to showcase talent isn’t huge.
However, purely from the implementation standpoint, rather than usefulness, the gallery feature is neatly executed. Within a few seconds, you can quickly embed videos from popular video hosting sites like YouTube, Vimeo etc. It’s with the same ease, you can create multiple galleries. Again, I totally don’t get the point!
The Public Resume
The Public Resume
The resume is well structured and is easy on the eyes. But, there is a clear absence of style. All resumes are bound to look the same and that negates the whole point of ditching the traditional format. Atleast with those MS Word resumes, there is a wide variety of templates to choose from.
Final Thoughts
Jobrary is fairly competent when it comes to showcasing your talent. I was a bit let down to see there isn’t anything groundbreaking about the app. It isn’t the problem of Jobrary alone, other players in the market also tend to limit themselves to a narrow playfield. Ideally, I would expect apps like these to be like About.me clones for professionals.
A professional’s online footprint is so widely scattered online these days. Github, Dribble, StackOverflow, blogs, marketplaces, Quora – and these are just some examples that are on top of my head for developers. Bringing in the contributions of a person in many such niche platforms under one umbrella could be a killer differentiator.
Frankly speaking, public resumes of this sort aren’t going to evoke much interest in the minds of the hiring team. What we need is a ton of imagination from the part of the developers. Anything but what they have got right now would be a great place to start!