Looking for a job at Architel or Big in Japan? Don’t bother sending your resume, instead send a link to your LinkedIn profile. Why? LinkedIn offers CONTEXT. Resumes provide no context. The problem with resumes is that they are often tailored for me and not the applicant. I don’t want you to tell me why you are perfect for my company on your resume, instead I want your LinkedIn profile to tell me about you saving the rest for our interview.

LinkedIn profiles are a VERY public way to display your background and experience. On the positive side, once you present your experience publicly on LinkedIn your managers and peers will have the opportunity to ‘vouch’ for you by offering a recommendation of your work. It is very powerful to review a LinkedIn profile and find someone with the perfect experience and then read one or two recommendations related to that experience. LinkedIn serves as a neutral third party offering a very simple and inexpensive way of offering context and authority to your background and experience. By putting your resume on LinkedIn you are making a public claim to your experience, if for example you exaggerate your role at a company it is very likely your false claim will become public. The final bit of context provided by LinkedIn is an understanding of who you know that I know. With LinkedIn I am immediately able to see who we know in common and I am able to reach out to our mutual contact and ask him about you. Your resume can’t do this.

Besides ‘context’ LinkedIn creates a standard resume format so I can ALWAYS find the information I am looking for. I am so tired of people sending me resumes in Word format. It wasn’t so bad when everyone agreed on one file format, i.e. .doc, but now people with Vista machines save their resumes in .docx, a format I can’t read on my lovely Mac. LinkedIn offers me a standard layout: summary of current positions, past positions, education and number of recommendations as well as links to blogs and web pages. If I am interested I can scroll down and get detailed information about each position and read through various recommendations. All in one nice, neat package. Cool! Looking for a job at Architel or Big in Japan? Email a link to your LinkedIn profile to careers@architel.com.