LinkedIn is the leading social network for connecting with professionals. You can upload your resume to it, or it can generate one for you from the information you’ve entered in your profile. The problem with these resumes is that they aren’t very attractive. You more or less have to create a proper resume yourself and use LinkedIn as a means of sharing it. Represent is a web service that allows you to create a resume you can easily share via email, or on Twitter and Facebook. It is a six-step process that asks you to enter a brief description about yourself, your work experience, academic history, skills & contact information, and select the resume’s color & layout.
You have to create an account to use Represent that you can register for free. If you have a Gravatar account associated with the same email address you used to sign up for the service, you will be able to import your Gravatar to your resume. After signing in, click ‘Let’s go!’ to get started.
You will have to enter all the information manually. The ‘About’ section asks for your name, current position and a brief description about you. Once you’ve finished entering information for a particular section, just move on to the next one from the column on the left. The ‘Experience’ section is meant for your employment history. For each work position that you’ve held, you can enter the job title, the company name, the duration of the job and a description of what your role was.
In the ‘Education’ section, you can enter details about your academic history such as the institutions you’ve studied at, the degree you pursued there, the time period you attended it for, and any further details regarding your degree. The ‘Skills’ section allows you to enter multiple skills that you’ve gained over the years. The ‘Contact’ section lets you enter your contact information for potential employers to get in touch with you. You can enter your email address, a phone number, a postal address, a website, and your Facebook and Twitter profile. Any one of the fields that you don’t want to use can be left blank.
Finally, Represent asks you to pick one of the the two available themes and a color for your resume. The color choice is very limited, as are the themes. You can click the little eye icon at the top any time to get a preview of what your CV looks like so far. Once you’re done and satisfied with everything, click the ‘Publish’ button. At the top of the CV, there is a share button that will let you post your CV on Twitter or Facebook, or email it to someone.
The problem with Represent is that all the information has to be entered manually, which can be tedious. You can’t even enter your joining and resignation date for a particular job and let the app automatically calculate how long you worked there. This not only means the resume creation process is more lengthy, but also that the duration for your current job will not update itself automatically. The resume can’t be shared directly to LinkedIn, nor does it connect with your LinkedIn account and therefore, no information can be imported/exported between the two. The service itself is nice and a viable effort at helping users create well-structured and good-looking resumes, but the developers should add support for connecting with LinkedIn at the very least.