I just ordered some business cards. They don’t have email addresses on them, I’m trying this first 50 as an experiment in that. What they do have is a link to my website, from which you can find my LinkedIn and Brazen Careerist profiles – which should tell you anything you want to know about me professionally.
(As I’m getting some people baffled by the email thing – perhaps it’s worth explaining briefly. 1. I hate email. 2. The card does have my Google Wave address on it, so you can work out my gmail address from that. 3. I can always write my email address on if I want someone to have it, but in general I don’t want to encourage people to email me, because of point 1.)
I’ve been talking to people this week and getting feedback on what they think about my website. A lot of it I’m taking on board and you can expect some minor changes in the next couple of days (thanks to everyone who took time to comment), but there’s one piece of advice I’m consciously not taking.
My resume is not on my website, you have to go to another website (LinkedIn or Brazen Careerist) to see it. If I could embed one of these, I might, but I don’t mind if people leave my website to go to another – I’m not trying to monetize their attention with advertisements etc. If they want to come back, they will. If they don’t, that’s fine too.
In general I’m wondering – is there any need for us to have a resume anymore?
Brazen Careerist are dynamic and more easily updated. On Brazen Careerist you can see that I’ve recently had a featured post (or 3!), on LinkedIn you can see that colleagues have taken the time to recommend me. Compared to a pdf – there’s no competition.
The end for my masters is in sight, and soon I’ll start job-hunting. For the kind of company I want to work for, I wonder if I’ll even need a paper resume at all. I hope that networking in person, contributing to projects, and having a good online presence will be sufficient.
What do you think?