Resume Unification

Continuing from my previous write-up, I would explain by what I mean by "Resume Unification"^©.

If you are into recruitment, you would, for sure, know about the pains in filtering the resume for any opening. Wouldn't it be just great if this job is already done for you so that you shortlist from amongst the shortlisted ones?

What we are trying to do is formalize a standard format so that there do not float around different styles of resumes in n-different formats, like MS Word doc, Adobe PDF, pure HTML, RTF etc.

I Googled for resume sample and got more than 700k results! It is good that you can get lot of help to write your resume. The pain is all to the recruiter, who has to understand all those different formats, prioritize based upon the content in different styles and finally shortlist from them.

This is exactly the problem that I wish to address. Putting up resume in a standard format so that it can not only be easily looked up by human beings but also filtered by automation - unifying the n-different styles of resume or n-types of file formats is what I call Resume Unification.

Starting with Resume Unification, I want to go to something very portable - that can fit in a floppy. Ok... may not be in a floppy, but not more than a couple of MBs.

This small file contains all details of your skillset, education, work experience, achievements etc - all signed / authorized by one or more rating agencies (something like you have Crisil ratings on any Mutual Funds stability) and encrypted so that not even the owner of the resume cannot tamper with it.

This resume is ready to participate in automation of selection procedure.

What I have been thinking of is nothing new and I am not a master-mind to be the only one to think in this direction. Ask Google and it will give you more than 25k search results for ePortfolio. What more - ePortfolio initiatives yields more than 1000 results. Quite a healthy result.

I stop here... sometime later, I would blog on ePortfolio.

Some links that may be useful for you:

• Chalk & Wire Professional Development Inc.
• The Open Source Portfolio Initiative
• The e-Portfolio Consortium
• A proposal to Andrew W. Mellon Foundation by Indiana University.
• ePortfolio at IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc.