I am talking about my
Facebook profile.
The following struck me recently when i got head hunted for a job by a search consulting firm. Within the standard approach of such a consulting firm, after a first contact by phone or mail, they usually request you to send them the good old form including your education and experience fitted in an A4 page. It is then up to you to add or not a 'hot or not' nice corporate picture of your face if you have one and if you decide to enrich this conservative format: probably a black and white picture would actually be better if you think positive and bet many paper photo-copies of this great candidate profile will be made. In addition you can always try to show your wild side by writing some of your fun hobbies in the 'Interests' section with a series of boring and generic key words such as Music, Cinema or some exotic sports.
Of course this standard format is part of a traditional and efficient process where HR consultants have to look at tons of resumes and most of the time only spend a few seconds with their sharply trained eyes to analyze your potential out of these one or two pages.
Nevertheless, when i look at the amount of real time and multimedia information i put on my Facebook profile, the gap strikes me.
The same level as in their standard A4 i.e.
- my personal info: may be not my year of birth but up to the current status of my relationship. The 'it is complicated' status might not help by the way.
- my education and current job info.
But the 'pic' section is when it gets a bit richer with the tons of pictures i can put. And not only pictures of me but sometimes of my family and friends.
And it gets full multimedia when my interests are described with my favorite music the 'Hunter' can listen to and hopefully enjoy (now he or she can even discover music while working thanks to the search for candidates) and the UGC video of my favorite sports.
But it gets much more powerful when looking at my network of friends and contacts (the 'entourage' application would not look so good in the A4 form i guess) and the threads i either posted myself or commented, luckily when they are business related.
And all this content is updated in real time . I admit that posts made during office hours might be an issue...
My profile is therefore complete, multimedia, social network enabled, and real time. It's all there now.
With this is mind i do believe a whole new area of opportunities should appear for start-up companies, beyond
Linkedin, either in the technical side or the service side to narrow the gap between the already available, self-structured and not yet analysed to its fullest potential data on each candidate and the traditional HR organisations and processes which have not yet changed to capture the new values generated by the 2.0 trends.
