The problem with resume submission is that it’s pretty much a one-way street. You send your resume or post it on a job board and things are pretty much out of your hands until a prospective employer decides to contact you.
Wouldn’t it be nice if someone looking at your resume could IM you with questions? Or maybe you could be alerted when an employer has looked at your resume.
It looks like such a thing may be in sight with the launch of Jobfox, a service that offers personal branding pages and the mobile tracking of resumes posted anywhere online. Launched by Rob McGovern, who is also the former CEO and founder of CareerBuilder, Jobfox looks like it could change the job application process, or at least keep the lines of communication open once a resume is posted.
The personal branding pages are kind of cool. Here’s a sample of a page created by one of Jobfox’s website designers:
http://www.jobfox.com/people/sarahsmith
The “Experience Map” feature offers a graphical representation of the candidate’s professional skills. Anyone looking at the page can click on one of the skill names to see details about that person’s experience. (This is one way to circumvent all the arguments about how many pages a resume should be.)
The site also has built-in widgets that enable candidates to easily share their Jobfox Pages on other social networking sites such as MySpace.
Jobfox’s resume notification feature sends a mobile text message to the page owner whenever his or her resume has been viewed by an employer. The Jobfox page is free and includes a unique url for each person.
This looks like a step up in the job-searching business. Can you think of any drawbacks?
