Last week I joined two separate Twitter chats; #tchat’s Recruiting/Marketing: Blurred Lines and #ibmswchat’s Recruiting & Attracting a Smarter Workforce, both of which turned out to be extremely engaging. On #ibmswchat one discussion specifically stuck in my head; it was a back & forth on the future or death of the resume, where I was pushing for career dashboards that were driven by social and analytics (me pushing analytics… what a shocker! :-).
Then today I read a post from Ricardo Pietrobon where he spoke about “educational portfolios as a measurement of actions rather than just information”. Since this post so resonated with me (thanks Ricardo, you always have great nuggets in your social stream) it drove me to put my thoughts on paper while they are fresh in my head.
For decades we’ve been using analytics to help us measure how businesses are doing, but have never comprehensively applied analytics to measure how individuals are doing. The reason is simple; we’ve never had enough quality data that ties directly back to the individual. However things are changing and with the growing adoption of social and mobile we are seeing increasingly detailed personal digital footprints being laid down across the enterprise (and beyond). This is slowly giving us a critical mass of information that should allow us to perform analytics that is accurate and reflective of what’s really happening in the physical world (as it relates to an individual).
So with the world becoming increasingly analytics-driven, it stands to reason that the resume should also be driven by analytics; so how would we build a new dynamic Career Dashboard without completely depersonalizing the whole experience? For me its quite simple and correlates to what is happening inside the Social Business itself where we have the old static resume-style Employee Profile morphing into a new dynamic Social Profile which integrates in their activity stream.
However I don’t believe that this goes far enough, and we need to take a final step and incorporate analytics. Some of the obvious types of analytics to be added to the Dashboard might be eminence, expertise, share of voice, activity level, resonance, network characteristics, and your role in it (information broker, maven, …). However, there are much more targeted analytics that could/should be considered. For such an example I’m going to refer back to Ricardo’s post where he suggested that “the popularity and source code quality in github repositories being complimentary or sometimes even more valuable than courses taken or other traditional curriculum vitae elements”.
Why not add a coding widget (infographic) which described your coding activity; the code you’ve written, how complex it was, how clean, well commented, how bug-free, what language, who used it, where, when, how often, … Could that be a nice piece of evidence to support your skills claims? And nice for recruiters who are looking for developers?
At the end of the day, you are what you do and not what you say!
Marie's Ramblings & Ruminations 
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