One of the clear pain points for all job candidates has been, and continues to be, simple data management: the data stored in a CV or resume. Every time a job candidate goes to apply for a job online, she types in information that she's already entered into a thousand other job boards and company websites. Now, many websites ask different questions, and have unique fields of data on their web forms for candidates to fill out. But a lot of these fields are the same over and over -- things like name, address, previous employers, and academic institutions.
Why not simply standardize the data, and put it in a central repository where the candidate can maintain and control its use? Wouldn't this not only save time for the candidate, but also empower candidates in a way that epitomizes the spirit of employee data protection?
The use case would go something like this: I'm a job seeker. I go to "distribute-resume.com" and see a list of 1,000 jobboards and companies. I click on the 35 job boards and companies that interest me. I click on another button, and presto - my resume is sent to them.
"But, wait," you say: "Not all of the websites want the same information." Well, I suppose that's true for the moment, but don't you think they would be happy to take a candidate's CV or resume without having to pay the marketing expense of attracting them in the first place? Surely, they'd take a free CV or resume, and THEN determine whether to keep it.
"But wait," you say, "Maybe not. They don't want just any candidate." Well, then, "distribute-resume.com" could preclude the wrong candidates from sending a resume /CV to the more exclusive websites. (OK, so I just gave away some of my old business plan. But never mind that.)
"But wait," you say: "candidates format and customize their CV or resume for specific companies or jobs." Well, a fair amount of that is because recruiters with low-attention span don't have time to read more than a page or two. If you turn the CV into structured data, software can do the first pass review instead of people, and the CV can be reformatted easily to fit the reviewer's needs. I spoke with an executive search company once about this, and estimated it cost them about 3,000 GBP (that's 6,000 of our banana-backed U.S. dollars) per year for a small recruiting agency to reformat CVs and resumes. With standardized data CVs and resumes, that all becomes automated.
Suppose you think that's too far fetched. So you do it a different way: every time a candidate visits a company website or job board that's part of "distribute-resume.com's" consortium, the candidate can click on a "distribute resume.com" icon, and her basic CV / resume information is pulled from "distribute-resume.com" into your current website's webform via XML. It would speed up a candidate's application online! A much improved experience.
My Angle
OK, I just gave away a chunk of my old business plan (just replace distribute-resume.com with Liquid CV. Note the cute little waterdrop icon on the liquid-cv website). It's a great idea, but I couldn't pull it off, so I focused on something else more oriented around the bi-directional flow of data (though you can still get your very own XML CV on the site).
Back to the idea. How do we do this? Standardized Data to begin with. It's one of the three components of the Liquid HR economy. My thought was to use HR-XML's resume standard, but there's no reason we couldn't expand upon this. Of course, the more granular the data, the better. Right now, the idea of using standardized data is happening behind the scenes - in a more B2B context, but not with the consumer experience in mind. Check out my earlier review of iProfile to get an example.
This is a challenging proposal, because it requires the distribute-resume.com to do business development on the B2B / consortium end of the market, as well as the consumer (candidate) market. But it will eventually happen. Most of the time people spend customizing CVs and retyping them is a waste of time. Screw this. Turn the resume / CV into data, and let people manage it themselves.
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