Should You Publish Your Resume On-line?

The other day I was assigned to do a presentation to a group of graduating college students in one of the big colleges in Manila. The resource speaker ahead of me is working for a company that publishes resumes online. He was there to encourage the participants to create their free account and start uploading their personal details to their personalized website. Employers would have access to these websites and hopefully they would be called for a job interview. Our presentations should last only an hour but he extended his presentation for another 30 minutes showing the participants every detail on how to upload their information in their personalized page. I really don't mind the inconvenience of waiting for another 30 minutes for him to finish his presentation for it gave me time to think if this kind of service is still relevant in today's digital workplace.

In order to have a job one must be able to get the attention of employers and for the longest time the submission of resumes starts off this process. It informs the employers basic information about the applicant that would guide them on who to pick for the next step which is the interview. The Internet became a convenient platform for people to be able to get their personal information to the hands of numerous employers at the least possible cost. No more searching at the classified ads of newspapers for open positions. No more standing in long lines and waiting long hours just to submit your resume to the human resource department. A number of companies are offering this service and they are making a killing by collecting personal information of job applicants.

Should you publish your resume on-line? To answer this question, we have to consider one of the basic rules of using the Internet which is don't publish your personal information on-line for your identity might be used in illegal transactions. Your information might also be used by companies to build a profile of your personal choices thus making it a tool for personal selling activities. Companies now a days spends a lot of money just to have access to these personal information to be used for their marketing and selling activities. In the digital age access to personal information is the new gold mine.

What should you put on-line to have an advantage against other job seekers applying for that very precious and limited job opening? Most employers now a days shun the resume as a tool in determining who would be qualified for the job. They would like to see the actual skill of the person that they are considering before calling them for an interview. In this way they are saving the company's time and resources by calling only people that they believe are qualified for the position.

It is sad to say that in most of my presentations that I had done involving graduating college students none had used the Internet as a tool to give them that edge. Most of the time they are merely using the Internet for gaming and posting in social media. There is no effort to engage in other on-line platforms like blogging, pod casting and participating in on-line forums. My advise to these college students is to make their names searchable in Google by attributing their names to the specific skill that they wanted to be employed for. Make sure that if they need an accountant or whatever, your name always comes up in the search results in Google so that you would be the first preference in any job offering of that company.