Promote your Google+ profile as an entrypoint to your Resume

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Promote your Google+ profile as an entrypoint to your Resume

Promote your Google plusWith just a few simple added texts in your profile, you can promote your Google+ profile to the top of the search pages. This will have a great impact when a headhunter/recruiter searches for you in Google or other search engines, thus maintaining your online portfolio perfectly and being in complete control. As a followup article on our previous successful article about using your Google+ profile as a “Interactive CV or Resume” this article is all about maintaining and using your Google+ profile as an entry-point for your Resume. With only 3 things to change or add to your profile, it will come closer to the top of the search queries:

  1. Google+ profile / About section
  2. Links section
  3. Search visibility

 

Google+ profile / About section

In this section you should add your typical data from your Resume, this includes a short introduction to sum up you as a person.

Introduction

Here you can write a small introduction to you as a person, you could take this from your professional summary in you Comoto profile.

Bragging rights

Here you write about your skills. This section is only meant to be a list of items separated with a comma mainly because in this area you have no ways to edit the layout of the text. This is making this place perfect to “Brag” with you skills and accomplishments in a list form.

Occupation

Please enter your current occupation as “Title” at which “Company”

Employment / Education

Under employment you enter your previous employment with Company name and Title and the period you worked there, please make sure this is aligned to your Resume information. Under education you enter your education in the same way as employment with School name, Major or Field of study and start/end date. Please enter them in the right order as there are for now no capability to change the order of these entries. (We have communicated with Google to either sort them either descending (Year) or to add the feature to manually sort the entries.

Links

Under links you should add links to the places where you have valid information regarding you as a person. For instance you could have a link to your Comoto Profile, your Personal Blog or Web-page, pages where you have written articles. Whether you use Linkedin, Xing, Viadeo or another social networking application for your professional network you should also add a link to that page. If you fancy you can also add a link to your Facebook profile. One thing you should be certain off is to have the information aligned on these different links, that is don’t have information else where which are not the same as the inform you have on your Google Profile.

Search Visibility

To have the information that you have entered made available to search engines for them to index the information and make it available in search queries, the only thing you need to remember is to check of the Search visibility option in your Google+ profile. You can find it under your Google+ profile under the About section and then at the bottom of that page.

Conclusion

With this you will be able to manage the information made available about you on the Internet. A Google+ profile is ranked pretty high in Google’s search engine when searching for persons. If you have the information listed in this article about the School’s you attended (with your degrees), places you have worked (Company and Title), Skills and Achievements (under bragging rights), Links (to more information about you) and a small introduction to you as a person under Introduction, it will be must easier for potential headhunters/recruiters to find the right information about you and you’re in control of this information. See it as an insurance to be in control of not only your CV but also being on control of other information regarding you as a person. Best of all the Google+ profile is highly ranked in Searches done with Google and other search engines.

7 +1 Reasons – could Google beat Facebook

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Could Google beat Facebook: The newest social networking endeavor get people fascinated and make them switch from Facebook to Google+? YES we think it could be the case.

There are many good reasons to plan and make the switch when Google+ is publicly available, ranging from our own CV feature on Google+ over ease-of-use to respect for data privacy.

The discussion has often been when Google would start their own adventure within social networking; they have tried before with less than great success. But maybe these tries have not been wholeheartedly. Now it seems that with the new Google Plus they want go beyond Social Networking and actually offer the user something new and different.

I think Google+ should be seen as a new way of Google to tie together all their different services to one central hub – your Google+ profile. Google Plus should not only be seen as a stand-alone competitor to Facebook as it is more or less a complete repackaging of the Google Experience on the Internet. They have been pioneers before and might do it again.

If you only look on the basic Social Network features, Facebook have had a huge head start, and Facebook have a huge number of daily users that are used to use Facebook’s features. Google need to offer the Facebook users some serious new reasons to seriously consider dumping Facebook for Google+.

There will always be early adaptors, geeks and nerds, and Google also have their loyal following, sitting hours/days in a row to get the first glimpse of a new service or product from Google. After these people have tried it, it is up to the masses to decide whether Google+ will become the Social Network success that Google wants.

When looking at Google+ in its current version there are some things that meets the eye and that looks promising.

Below you can find a list of features which from our perspective could be that positive element that could be able to make people consider a switch – or using both…..

1. Integration with Google Services

The easiest thing for Google to do better than Facebook is of course the integration to all of Google’s other services.  That is, Google will probably build Google+ social networking features into if not all then all the service where Google+ makes sense. Google+ is already integrated into the navigation bar at the top right of almost all Google products, Gmail, Photos (Picasa), Reader, Web and others. This feature gives you the ability to monitor all Google+ events and at the same time easily to share content without ever leaving the Google service you might be using right now. A lot of internet users use Google’s other free services (Gmail, Maps, Search, Translate etc.), and after Google have integrated Google+ so closely to all their services it may feel a bit stupid to exit this universe to share something with online friends. If Google+ succeeds in taking the “special social experience” and make it part of the overall Google experience, they have a brilliant leverage to get people to use Google+.

2. Better Friend Management

Google are spot-on with the “Circles” concept, it is more in line with the normal way we build and handle friendships in real life. You probably have several different kinds of friends, and you probably also want to share specific things with somebody or groups in numerous different ways. Facebook has there “Groups” feature which lets you form groups of friends, but frankly compared to the easy way Google’s Circles the Facebook method is more tedious . Google has taken the pain out of your online friendship “management” with the introduction of circles.

3. Sparks – Find interesting stuff to share

The Sparks feature of Google+ is another important factor that Facebook does not have. Sparks is a way for Google to use their search engine to generate interesting stuff to share for users of Google+. Using the advantages of the Google search engine is an important factor to renew the content that is shared on Google+. On Facebook it often seems as the same information is send around again and again. And remember on Facebook you need to leave your present site to find interesting information to share, unless it is already shared by others and you just re-share the information.

4. Super Android Application, although not available on IPhone “yet”

With the launch of Google+ the Google+ Android application was also made available. It is a very nice piece of software and getting data from your mobile phone has suddenly become a lot easier. The app is already great, but my best guess is that the integration with Google and the Android version will be one of the major accomplishments of Google to make Google+ a success. People are online 24-7 and are always on reachable on their mobile phone, and they want to have their social network with them all the time. The Facebook’s solution is although nice looking but a bit troublesome to use from our experience.

5. Privacy and the right to your data.

Facebook has been pounded numerous times for their behavior in safeguarding your personal data. You are forced to publicize parts of your personal data to use Facebook and it is still hard to permanently delete your Facebook profile. This is done differently in Google+ as they have a different approach , you can take all the data you have in Google+ and walk away. This is easily done on a Google+ site called www.dataliberation.org.  With just a few clicks you can download data from your Picasa Web Albums, Google profile, Google+ stream, and other Google products and delete your profile. Also notice the Google Takeout feature on www.google.com/takeout.

6. Very strong Chat even with groups of people

Google has their Hangouts feature which is a very strong system for video chatting. Creating ad hoc group to make video chats can be done easily with this feature in Google+. The Android version calls them huddles and not hangouts, which makes it easy for Android users to start up a text chat with other Google+ users.

7. Content Sharing with focus on your privacy

It has been discussed many times but Privacy issues are here to stay, people advocating for stronger privacy on Social Networking sites wants us to able to have the user assigning the sharing level to each item they share. This has been heard by Google and they have built this capability into Google+. When you share an article or upload an image on Google+ you have to select which circles you want to share this with, this is somewhat different then the Facebook setup with preset lists of sharing practices.

8. (or +1) Our own Google+ “hack” using it as an interactive Resume

It is easy and can be very useful to share your Resume on Google+, even this feature has Google done better with the help of Comoto off course. You are able to control the images in the Photostrip and to create an interactive Resume with no hassle at all. This is also possible in Facebook, but due to Facebook’s zooming algorithm it is not that good looking. Google centralizing function makes is easier to have a decent Resume on your profile to be shared with other users of Google+. To see more about this feature please have a look at our post here.

Use your new Google+ profile as an interactive Resume/in , , , , , , /by

Google+ Profile

We have previously – for instance with Facebook – seen a Social Network being used as an interactive Resume. With this guide you can be one of the first to use Google+’s new social network features to create an online and interactive Resume profile – simply by following the easy steps in this post. Remember that the innovative Comoto Team came first again, exclusively for you.

This guide explains how to create the Google+ Resume manually, but we are working on a solution were you can create the necessary 4-5 image files with the Comoto Resume Builder. We will be adding an easy feature to export your Resume template as image files. We will make a follow up post when we launch the export feature.

Use your Google+ profile as an interactive Resume

To get a feeling of the look and feel of this feature and how it could be done please have a look at the profile below. (you can try it out here)

Now that you have had a look at how it works let’s get back to the guide. The overall idea behind this “hack” is to create images that are wider than they are tall – a good image ratio will be 1200×600 – then fill these images with information from you Resume. Creating a picture with these dimension will create an image where the part of the image being visible in the photostrip on your Google+ profile will be the center 600×600 pixels of that image (just reduced in size, down to 125×125). When pressing the small image the entire image will be visible, and voila you have an interactive Resume on your Google+ profile.

The result of pressing the “CV Summary” image in the above Google’ profile, is that it will show an image as seen in the image below.

The images visible in the image strip in Google+ have a size of 125×125 pixels. For you to create a perfect image and have the illusion of an interactive Resume you need to work with these numbers.

You can just use the standard image sizes we have used here, put you can also play with the image sizes and try out alternative numbers. With the size of 1200×600 you will have a sidebar of 300 pixels on each side of the center of the image where you can put Resume related information. Most people today have a screen size bigger than 1200×600 so when viewing this size of image, there will be no cropping or resizing, so the illusion of an interactive Resume in your Google+ profile will be complete.

In our example we have made the following images Resume Summary, Work Experience, Education and Languages and Recommendations, there is still one missing to be used as the photo-strip includes 5 pictures.

After you have created the images with your data you simply upload them by entering your Google+ profile and upload the created images. We recommend to upload the pictures in the sequence you want them shown. (You can modify the photo-strip afterwards but that can be a bit tedious).

If you have question or want to share your newly created Google+ Resume with the world, feel free to leave a comment below or contact us via our contact page (here) for further info and/or sample files on this Google+ “hack”.