Interesting career networking site: resu.me

The folks at Resu.me asked me to check out their website, which they are launching to become a job and career networking site for the Millenium generation.

So I checked it out.

Here are the good parts:

• The focus is on helping people get started quickly. So they enable sign on using facebook connect – no long winded registrations needed.
• The site makes it possible to import your Linkedin profile – so no need to build a resume . And you get a vanity URL. Mine is http://gautam.resu.me
• There’s a tab which I think is a cooliris app- so if you are a photographer or other visual artist you can show off your videos and pictures there.
• It builds an activity stream – which shows what you do on the site, and you can add your blog posts/status updates to that also. It also imports your existing blogs from Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress and Posterous.
• There’s a stats chart – which promises to be interesting (or depressing, if you find that people are not viewing your profile) :-)

Things I didn’t quite like or what didn’t work for me:

• The Reader tab is to enable you to import your OPML file of RSS feeds or one feed at a time. Tried doing that – but it’s not working. The larger question is why would you read your feeds on a career networking site. This is one example of over-engineering features
• The UI is quite dull and doesn’t engage me.
• The Jobs section is US centric. There’s no other country mentioned there. Which is quite useless for folks from India. I don’t know why they invited me to check out the site.

So overall I think it needs to focus on getting the job search process done well, and let go of the blogging/reader aspects – or at least tuck it away and not make it so prominent.

Will it become a linkedin competitor? I doubt it. Even millenials have linkedin profiles and networks in place. Getting them to move – even as Linkedin focuses more and more towards being a service focused on jobs – would be tough.

The site also needs to think about how to attract recruiters – and showing them a value that they may not be getting at Linkedin.