[Ed. note: Today's post features Sean Lindo, community manager at Box.net, who describes ways of making your resume stand out from the crowd. The Box.net application on LinkedIn, along with the rest of the inApps on LinkedIn can be found here]Let’s make a bet. A safe one. I’m sure there’s more than a few of you out there that have spent hours, even days crafting the perfect cover letter and polishing your resume for a group of prospective employers, only to never hear back from any of them. You swear you knocked it out of the park, but you just didn’t get the response you were hoping for. The reality is that there were at least a dozen other people that did the same thing and thought they knocked their resume and cover letter out of the park too.
Whether times are good or bad, getting that extra edge has always been important. You may have the right experience, degrees and attributes, but when employers have stacks and stacks of resumes sitting on their desk, you need something that’s going to make you stand out, especially these days. Writing great cover letters and resumes are a good start – an essential one, at that. But how can you go beyond that?
Showcase your work with Box.net and LinkedIn
One of the great things about LinkedIn is that you can show and tell so much more about yourself. Potential employers and connections can read recommendations about you, what your interests are and other details that are tough to fit into a standard cover letter and resume. Using Box.net’s Files app for LinkedIn, you can showcase what makes you and your experience unique – you can showcase your work.
In case you’re not familiar with Box, it’s a service that lets individuals and businesses store and share all kinds of content online. Besides standard files like Word documents, Excel sheets and PowerPoint presentations, you can store creative files, digital photos, videos, audio files…anything you want. This is where you should take a moment to let your imagination and creativity run wild. No matter what field you’re in, you can upload it to Box and share it right on your LinkedIn profile for the whole world to see. Share things like:
• Illustrator and Photoshop files to display a creative portfolio
• Writing samples of white papers, product brochures or press releases you’ve authored
• A comprehensive archive of professional photography you’ve put together
• Audio files of commercial jingles or voiceover projects
• Digital movies you’ve created or video testimonials from your best references
• Coding samples to show off your awesome programming skills
That just scratches the surface. If you think about all the work you’ve done, chances are you can share so much more of it than you thought. And you can do this easily just by uploading content to Box, putting it in a designated folder and sharing that folder on your LinkedIn profile. Get the Box.net Files app here.
As the Community Manager for Box.net, I use the Files app to showcase some of my work at Box – podcasts I did when we launched our iPhone app and links to interviews and articles I’ve been a part of for various Box launches. It’s the kind of thing I could never do on a resume and cover letter.
This goes the other way too. When I was interviewing candidates for a marketing opening at Box, a few candidates mentioned pieces of information they learned from my profile and referenced some of the files I posted in my own Box portfolio. It impressed me how much research they did ahead of the interview and how detail-oriented they were. Those points were not lost in our internal candidate discussions.
Again, it all comes back to what makes you stand out. You might have the same degrees, professional background and skill set as the competition. But no one has this – your body of work. Showcase it proudly.
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Comments
I was always told to stand proud. be confident in yourself, people can sense this. It wins people over and will definitely get you noticed. do your homework on the company and the interviewer, excellent tip.
Thank you for the post! This is a great way to help any professional stand out a bit more. Is Box only visible to first degree connections? Or can this be made visible to anyone by switching it on/off in Accounts and Settings?
Dear Sean,
Thanks for this great article. As a Director of Career Development at an urban university, where I work with Liberal Arts students and alumni who pursue a wide array of career paths, I am always looking for ways they can show off their individual talents. While our university is working on developing an e-portfolio, its purpose and format does not work particularly well for allowing students to showcase their work to external constituents such as prospective employers and networking contacts. I’m a big fan and proponent of LinkedIn, and I’m delighted I can now teach my students additional ways to use this powerful resource.
Thanks very much for your article and for the work you do with Box.net.
Best wishes,
~Sloane Thompson
Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis
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This is nice, thanks for sharing it.
But I wonder, why isn’t this app listed among the others, under “Applications” on the left side of my LinkedIn control panel?
I also have a question about a Groups feature request, but I will browse for that category and see if it’s been addressed already and/or see if it’s in the Q&A on the LI website.
@Bobbi Jo – The left hand navigation shows a breakout of the applications you already have downloaded. However if you actually click on the word ‘Applications’ in that navigational area, it should take you to our Applications page http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=application_directory&trk=hb_side_apps that will display our current list of available. I hope you find others that you like!
-Dirk
Another great way to augment your resume is with a videoBIO that brings personalization to an otherwise 1 dimensional presentation of skills. New sites like http://www.videobio.com allow you to do this for free or have one professional done.
Great Article..
Another tip I found that I liked was using PowerPoint to do your Resume layout instead of Word etc. It gives you a lot more flexibility to creat something that stands out visually.
A great example of this is at David Seah’s site: http://tr.im/mCWA
Have fun,
graham
http://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamfarrar
This is a another nice new feature here at LinkedIn. But since I’ve noticed that a part of the interview process seems to involve potential employers Googling candidates, it would be nice if LinkedIn also offered some kind of Analytics tracking for our profiles.
Knowing who sees our profiles, where they came from, which pages they viewed, etc… would help us evaluate the interest level of potential employers, as well as pointing out weaknesses and strengths in our profiles.
It can also make it possible to measure changes made in the profile.
I’m not a premium member, and don’t know if this is a paid feature yet. It would be nice to have available for all account types, though.
I recently started using Box.net and like what I see so far. I can easily control what is viewed by my contacts and what stays private. I especially like the iPhone app that lets me access all my files on the go. I still don’t fully understand how the collaboration piece works as none of my contacts have started using it yet. If we are collaborating on a file do I get the opportunity to see what was changed before that file is viewable to all of my connections?
@Mark-I think tracking would need to be done through the actual document. I use the Huddle and like the fact that I can share the documents with only my team…It’s our own private piece of cyberspace. I post a document. One of my colleagues can then download and lock the document and make their changes and then upload the doc (which then unlocks the document). It has worked great for projects where everyone owns a different piece of the document. I can also send a notification to my team when the document has been uploaded. The part I most like about these types of applications is that I don’t have to be connected the the company’s common share drive so I can access the information from wherever I am when I log into my LinkedIn homepage.
After reading through this blog I immediately registered with box.net and attmepted to add my resume to my profile. I have tried several times to preview it but the streaming through ipaper seems to not happen. Does anyone have a suggestion? Thanks
Thanks Sean for the post, Box.net does look a very good app and makes linkedin even better. I’m going to have to spend some time with this app, but it looks quite straight forward to use (unlike the usualFTP stress!!).
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