Ok. Let’s say you want to change jobs.  Or impress a potential client.  Or let someone you met at a loud and crowded networking Happy Hour get to a know a little something more in depth about you, beyond your business card and the fact that you were sipping your white wine while everyone else was knocking back a boatload of Glenlivet Scotch, so you possibly know a lot more about them than they do about you.

Do you send them an email with your resume or cv (curriculum vitae) attached?  I don’t think so.  The CV was introduced in 1902.  To put that in context: Ford Motor Company was founded in 1903; the Model T was introduced in 1908. You don’t want to be caught using out of date technology – you want to be on the cutting edge.  And you don’t want to be sending a document that is D.O.A. ( dead on arrival). One recruiting company founder called the classic, old fashioned resume ” a “career obituary” that becomes outdated the minute a candidate punches the send button.”  That is because it doesn’t continuously evolve and reflect your achievements and your career in real time with live links to what you’re doing now.

The solution, clearly, is an online portfolio, which highlights your strongest value proposition. It can encompass presentations, graphs, video, audio, work samples, scanned documents … a body of work which shows you in many dimensions and can include your reflections and how your work has deepened and progressed, something an old style resume could never do.

So, if we agree you should have an online portfolio, how do you go about getting one?

Well,  you can produce it yourself, although it may be a smoother and more effective process to get some professional help, particularly if you are time crunched or your tech skills are limited or you need some guidance in how best to showcase your skills.

One key thing to remember is generic resumes are used to eliminate people. “Until the development of résumés in an electronic format, employers would have to sort through massive stacks of paper to find suitable candidates without any way of filtering out the poor candidates. The Employment Management Association in 1997 reported that the average cost-per-hire for a print ad was $3,295, while the average cost-per-hire with the Internet was $377.^[4] This in turn has cut costs for many growing organizations, as well as saving time and energy in recruitment. Employers are now able to set search parameters in their database of résumés to reduce the number of résumés which must be reviewed in detail in the search for the ideal candidate.” Although an online resume is less expensive for companies to review and therefore to your advantage, the more generic the resume, the more you fit into a cookie-cutter format, the easier you are to eliminate, even without a thorough examination of your qualifications.

Some companies who produce online resumes say they exist for the candidate’s benefit, but often their business model is based on the fact that corporations, not candidates, are where the big money is, and their actual customer is HR.  Follow the money. Do you think VC investors put millions of dollars into free software to help you get a job, impress a client, hook a networker or otherwise serve your interests ? That would sure be nice, but no. They serve large corporations.The real purpose of some of these providers is to help HR do a better job of weeding out and eliminating candidates before the interview, thereby reducing hiring costs and saving millions of dollars for large companies. And AdvancingWomen.com is all for corporations increasing efficiency and saving money. However, what you want is to get  in the door and into an interview so you can land the job. And what corporations really want is to hire the best people so they can offer the best and most competitive product or service.

So AdvancingWomen.com believes it is in the best interest of both the large corporations and the candidates to build and review individualized portfolios focused on the business case for your value to a company.  Technology which accelerates the process and costs less can be a very good thing.  But, as we’ve seen in recent weeks, decisions are made every day which can be either very profitable or very costly, far more costly than hiring decisions, which are after all, like career portfolios, a bottom line investment. Portfolios which more fully display a candidate’s true value can be critical to both parties.

It is your responsibility to create a portfolio which will fully showcases and broadcasts your own value.

AdvancingWomen Career Portfolios can help with that. Our career partners have developed best practices in effective portfolio design over the last five years, producing portfolios that have helped hundreds of executives and professionals get jobs.  We can help you.