There are a lot of CVs on the Internet.
At the Talent Sourcing Conference, held at Monster HQ in August, we heard that Monster alone have 10 million UK CVs in their database. There are millions more on other generalist and niche job boards too. Many people also upload their CVs to the public web where you can find them for free if they have been indexed by a Search Engine.
I have been thinking about my own CV recently – it is not a document that I regard with much affection. In the course of your career, have you ever put your CV to the web, either on your own website or uploaded it to a CV database? Is your CV even up to date at the moment? I know mine isn’t. If your CV is up to date, is it somewhere findable on the web? The answer to all of these questions could very well be “No”, I expect that is the case for many people. Keeping this kind of document up to date is quite a daunting task that most of us do not give time to unless we are very actively seeking a new employer.
It seems unlikely that any one person’s current CV is findable on the web, even if you had access to all the job boards, all the CV databases and the best CV finding search strings on the planet.
This could be why the discipline of sourcing is getting so much attention at the moment. Sourcing is really about people, rather than just their CVs. Quite often a CV is only received as a result of a sourcer’s research and their subsequent conversations with a potential candidate.
Your CV might not be up to date but do you have any of these:
- A LinkedIn profile
- A Twitter account
- A blog
- A Facebook profile
- A profile on your company’s website?
- Have you ever attended an industry event/conference?
- Have you ever been quoted in the press?
I’m sure you can answer “Yes” to at least one of the above, if not to two or three. Then your name and some information about what you do for a living is probably findable by a sourcer.
CVs are often quite out of date. Let’s be honest – it is much easier to keep your 160 character Twitter bio up to date than your whole CV. A person’s last status update or blog post can give you an idea of how up to date the information you are seeing is. Similarly, attendee information from events is only as old as the event, news articles are dated and companies rarely leave profiles of past employees on their websites.
Once a sourcer has a name, from an old CV or one of the other sources listed above, it is usually possible to find out more about a person. A people search engine like pipl can help you track down other online profiles for a person. One piece of online information tends to lead to another.
Do you make the most of the information out there on the web?
Related: How to Use Twitter to Source Candidates by Location.
