How do you read a LinkedIn profile?

Or any other career profile or a resume, for that matter.

For me the key to understanding a career profile is EXPERIENCE.

The 2012 study by The Ladders shows, that I am not alone with this approach. Average recruiter spends 80% of time looking at the six data points on a resume:
• Name
• Current job title
• Past job title
• Start-end date for last employment
• Start-end for past employment
• Education

How is this data then processed, I wandered?

My understanding is that thus collected information is used to create a mental picture of one’s experience. A picture, which is matched with a picture formed by reading a job description.

Let me illustrate.

LinkedIn profile, or any modern resume, is a well-structured document, which presents a pattern of repeated similar blocks of information – descriptions of a job experience and education.

Each of those descriptions in turn is structured according to a particular pattern.

Job description always consists of:
— Dates of the start and the end of employment — to correctly place an experience on an overall career history timeline and to show the employment duration.
— Job title – to show to which professional field or sphere the job belongs and what is a level of the position relative to other possible positions in an organization
— Name of the company – to show in which industry the experience is gained and to show some measure of the size of the company

When we depict EVERY place of employment described on a resume according to this algorithm, we can form a consistent and comprehensive picture of one’s career timeline. A visual resume.

Term visual resume exists in a recruitment and HR community for few years now. Several attempts have been made to turn text resume into set of pictures. Visualize.me, Re.vu, ResumeUp.ru are the ones that gained the most attention of the media and the HR community. None of the above had gained popularity nor became a practical tool in recruitment. In my opinion it happened because all those attempts were flawed.

All of them serve a desire of a candidate to bring more attention to their resume, to stand out from the crowd. Which is fine for the candidate, but goes absolutely against the needs of the recruiter, HR or a hiring manager.

The same abovementioned study shows, that the recruiter first looks at the picture, if it is included on a resume. So, if resume contains a photo of the candidate, recruiter spends 19% of time looking at it. 1/5 of the time is spent on reviewing meaningless information only because it “grabs the eye”. What a waste! And an unstructured visual resume justly perceived as yet another time wasting and distracting toy.
And yet there is a way to make a depiction of a career history into valid and practical recruitment tool!

The way to do this is to tightly connect career visualization to a process of matching a CV to a Job, a mental process which takes time every time a recruiter or a hiring manager is looking at the resume.

If we convert a textual description of a job to a visual block, using the same algorithm we have used when we converted a candidate experience into a career timeline, we can than visually match those two!

Here is just one example of how it looks in practice
http://talentmap.ru/vacancy/compare/73590/57c7abd9
Ideally, uniform career timeline visualization (I will call it a GraphCV) should be available in every recruitment channel: job sites, ATS, HRM systems, and should be seen every time the resume or career profile is viewed or matched to a job.

It can be a simple and practical CV pre-view and CV-to-Job matching solution in screening. All experiences hidden on a second and third page of one’s resume can finally be brought to light and considered for relevancy. Overall length of the career history, revealing experience, unusual gaps, hikes and drops – all that becomes instantly visible in a context of relevancy to a particular job.

Added with more information for each place of employment (skills, team size, location, performance evaluation and other measurable) GraphCV can become a great tool for deep career analysis, peer-to-peer matching, talent rotation and other career planning and internal HR processes.

And when it will, we will start talking about things we can SEE on a career profile. And I promise you — we will see and NOTICE more, then we ever did with text resume!