I imagine that this is an issue that faces most professionals, and the more years you have under your belt, the worse the problem is likely to become.

There are ‘MANY’ job sites which offer the facility to hold your details in a database format, and allow you to update and/or modify these as required. This is great for keeping a record, and allowing the sites to index your skills, but does not give you much control over the presentation of the infromation, nor does it allow for tayloring the CV to fit specific requirements ~ this is always left to the ‘Cover Letter’!

This isn’t always enough! For example, my skills cover 2 very specific areas: Senior Business Management, and Information Systems Consulting. These differing skills make it impossible for me to only have one CV as people looking for senior managers would often see me as too technical, and people looking for a senior IT consultant may see me as not technical enough.

If I was to include everything within one CV, it would be far too much for either group to gain a real understanding of my skills.

Easy I hear you say, have two accounts with each agency, focusing on the different roles!

But doing this doubles the effort to keep these ‘fresh’, and regarless of how carefully I segregate the two roles this approach leads to inconsistancies and overlaps with differing sites, possibly leading to potencial employers seeing vastly different CV’s and potencially being very suspicious.

Also, this still doesn’t address the issue of needing to taylor the CV to fit a specific requirement.

Strangely, Google may have the answer to all these problems.

Google docs allows you to create and share various types of document with people world wide, and allows you to have a single copy which you control.

With a very simplistic way of sharing the document, added to the search facilities Google is famous for, probably provides the most powerful recruitment tool that anybody could possibly need.

For my scenario (above), you can create two CV’s, and share the access to them with many recruiters ~ And if needs be, only give access to the relevant CV to certain agencies. It would also allow you to create a taylored CV, and share this with the agency that is putting you forward for a specific role, and if necessary, removing it afterwards.

This functionality could then be extended to employers, where they could be allowed to keep your ‘Always up-to-date’ CV on file ~ without having to actually store them!!!

Doing this also gives you far more control over, and a view of, who has access to your CV, and provides you with the facility to format its’ content in the way you want it to be seen.

I think the facility is excellent, and if the recruitment world would take up the batton, this could reduce a candidates workload, whilst providing the most accurate and relevant information to agencies and employers.

For an example of what Google docs can do, I have created a high-level overview presentation of my career below, please feel free to have a look, as I have shared this with ”Everybody’

I get ‘Linkedin’ & ‘Plaxo’ ~ They are great resources to expand my professional network, for keeping in-touch with colleagues, and can certainly help with job hunting.

I even get sites like ‘del.icio.us’ & ‘Digg’ as people like to share the things they find on the web, both professionally and personally.

I understand the value of blogging, instant messenger, skype, email, and even SMS & MMS!

I have found Ping.fm (I’m using it to publish this), and find it REALLY useful to post to multiple sites, and save a LOT of repetition.

But, although I use it, I can’t for the life of me workout the REAL benefit of using ‘Twitter’!

As far as I can see, Twitter offers no real advantage over the other services, and means (if I didn’t use Ping.fm) that I would just have another site to update.

So why has it become so popular?

In my opinion, there only appears to be 2 reasons:

1. It’s a very lazy way to post small bits of info to a wide audience ~ i.e. it’s fast-food culture for communications

2. There are a lot of famous people whom you can follow, and it’s cheaper (and probably more accurate) than reading ‘Hello Magazine’

That would beg the question, why do so many highly intellegent and skilled individuals use something that has no real benefit?

The only answer I could come up with is – Because they can!

To prove the point, I’ll tweet the existance of this post….

And, unless I’m missing something, nor does it appear to generate revenue. This, therefore, can’t be a business model that has a future unless they find a way to monetise the brand.

I can see ways that they could, but I’m not sure people would continue to use it (due to the low value of the service provided) if a charge was made.

Additionally, as they allow access to the data without actually going to twitter, they could not make significant revenue from their web site.

This is a problem, I’m sure, that must cause the execs to have sleepless nights.

Saying which, with the amount of funding they keep getting thrown at them, I can’t see they’ll be too worried!