The idea
My working title is www.ratemyCVandcoveringletter.com. The idea is that job seekers upload their CVs and covering letters onto a website for others to offer feedback around how they could be improved. People uploading documents can screen who they want to receive feedback from, e.g. only from people who work in the same industry, only people with over 5 years experience etc. Ideally, there would be an incentive system so that if a job seeker gets an interview or offer having received feedback from the site, contributors get some kind of kick-back, although I don’t yet know how to make this element work.
What social need does it address?
There seems to be a real need related to the ‘translating’ CVs and covering letters as workers move increasingly between countries. Not translation in the literal sense (although I’m sure that might also be helpful) but more in the sense of what is culturally appropriate. Some of the issues are simply around layout and formatting. For example, in some countries the ‘correct’ approach is to include a photo and to list achievements in chronological order with the most recent things appearing last. However, in the UK including a photo is generally not advised and the convention is to list recent achievements first.
However, the majority of the issues are around content, tone and style, which is often much harder for migrants to gage appropriately. For example, there are certain buzzwords or types of skills that employers here are looking to see evidence of, but this is often implicit and highly industry/sector specific. I’ve often found that the most valuable thing for prospective job-hunters is having someone with experience look over their CV and covering letter and give them advice. At the moment, there are recruitment consultants who offer this service but it’s expensive and I think the web platform for developing a cheaper, more open-source solution.
So far my explanation has focused how this idea might benefit migrants because, for them, this issue is particularly pertinent. Getting the right job is often critical to their ability to transition successfully into a new country and something many struggle with at first. However, designed and executed in the right way, I imagine a website that offered this service would be attractive to a broad range of job seekers.
What’s new about it?
I’m not sure this is a ‘new’ idea (in the definitional sense) but I think it does respond to a genuine need for feedback and advice around CVs and covering letters and I’m not aware of any web-enabled, peer-to-peer way to gather this. However, I think this idea does build on existing web paradigms around peer-generated reviews and ratings (e.g. Tripadvisor, Amazon etc), job seeking (e.g Monster.com) and collaborative editing (e.g. Wikipedia, Google Documents etc). I think the newness is around responding to a genuine and unmet need in a way that builds upon web behaviours that people are already familiar with.
Idea submitted by Lydia Howland
I work as a design and innovation consultant. My role is to design, conduct and synthesise our user research and to use the outcomes from this to give direction to our ideas and the development of our pilots and prototypes.
February 18th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
One problem I see with this is with privacy, assuming the person strips out the obvious personal details (name, birthdate, address, etc) there is still a lot of personal and confidential information on most peoples CVs. The amount of information that might need to be stripped from a CV to “anonymize” it might also destroy the usefulness of such a website. While I like the concept I’m not sure if it will work in practice.
March 17th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
[...] Rate My CV [...]
March 19th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
I just ran across this site which does something similar:
http://razume.com/
March 19th, 2008 at 10:43 pm
[...] Rate My CV [...]
March 19th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
Hi Imran,
thanks for your comments. Privacy is definitely going to be an interesting one with this…. and thanks for letting us know about Razumé. It’s certainly similar to Lydia’s idea. But I reckon we could be a bit more exciting on the tech front
Perhaps this idea could be used to start to re-think what a CV is altogether…. the web’s meant to be a good platform for self-expression – could it be used to get a bit more personality into your average job application and in doing so improve access to work for people with less conventional skills backgrounds? See blog post on this….
March 20th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Razume (http://razume.com) already does social resume review. You block out the parts that identify you so there are no privacy problems. The point isn’t that someone can’t identify you, just that your name isn’t out there. If you are really worried, then block out company names too, but that seems silly since the point of a resume is to get people interested in you.
April 4th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Is there room in this idea for a skills wiki? Things that are culturally part of a job in the UK might not be taken from granted in other countries/cultures and vice versa. If you say you have “retail experience”, that could mean that you’re stocking, checking and running admin on a whole bank of retail systems, or that you know how to put 20p in a till and give the correct change.
All I’m thinking is that only the author knows what they have done (hence CV writing is expensive – it’s time-consuming), and there is also an issue of confidence – is a migrant worker as liklely to blow their own trumpet if they don’t know how to describe their skills in the first place?
A wiki would mean that there is some kind of context to the CV side of things – a framework to hang the CV on.
Potentially this wiki could also include information about the finer points of international employment law – again a sticky subject for many migrants who get conned by unscrupulous employers…
April 7th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
[...] had built an entire working website and mobile app and the small-but-perfectly-formed team behind Rate My CV had done an incredible amount of work with a core group of only [...]
April 11th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
[...] Rate My CV – support for marginalised workers [...]
April 15th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
I like the idea. Would love to have it in Dutch also.
I don’t see what extra value you plan to offer compared to razume.com.
Wouldn’t it be a fun idea if people could offer career path advice to each other? Like having a load of people generating creative ideas about what a smart next career step could be for you. Or otherwise if you have a certain career goal people could advice you on what kind of steps you could take to get to that goal.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Hey,
I’ve just watched the You Tube video and had some further ideas about CV Life Line. I wanted to see how the project is doing. I’m thinking about submitting an idea to the next social camp involving CVs and wanted to speak to someone from the CV Life Line project about it.
my email is: awfbone@yahoo.co.uk
Look forward to hearing from you
February 20th, 2009 at 11:58 am
I wrote an application some 5 years ago called RateMyCV under the domain name ratemycv.com for a client. I did some metrics and % profile complete kind of thing. I didn’t quite get it at the time and the company went down after that. I have the source code lying around somewhere I think.. ohwell