It’s been a good decade since Dan Pink proclaimed the rise of the Free Agent Nation, and whilst it’s far from clear that this shift in working patterns has fully materialised, it is hard to dispute that people are increasingly thinking like a company, doing as much as they can to enhance their personal brand and so on.
Whilst the web, and in particular the social web, has delivered many great avenues to help people spread their brand online, the bedrock of the recruitment industry hasn’t really changed. The CV has largely remained unaltered for decades, despite the multitude of new ways to learn about what people have done, and indeed what they think.
A new German website is setting out to change that. Somewhere is a visual blogging platform aimed at freelancers, and indeed employees, that are looking to create an engaging story of their work or career for peers.
The platform claims to offer people a more visual and interactive platform to showcase their work. Each post, branded as a ‘spark’, features an image alongside a short snippet of text that explains what that person is currently working on (or indeed anything else around that project). As with other blog platforms, each spark can include tags and hyperlinks.
As you can see, it’s not a million miles away from a Pinterest profile, and as such it does appear to lean more towards those in creative industries that have a desire to create a strong, visual display of their work. Co-founder Justin McMurray has claimed that the site allows users to break free from the static ‘straight-jacket’ provided by CVs and LinkedIn.
Whether Somewhere allows people to do that in a better way than in a standard blog, or even via an About.me page, I’m not so sure. Clippings.me offer a similar kind of service for writers, and I’m not sure at all that it has gained critical mass, certainly compared to the humble process of writing a blog.
There is clearly a move to try and add a richer portrayal of our work history, which whilst great to see, I’m not sure any have really cracked the nut (yet).
Hmm, not sure I like it. Isn't it trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist?
Hi Adi, Justin from Somewhere here. Thanks for the post and interesting thoughts. A lot of people draw the comparison to CVs. We're certainly not trying to make a better CV (hundreds of others are tackling this slightly inane task). We're providing an alternative to it. So the real core of the Somewhere is not the profile page but the interactions you have with others; seeing them over time share their work and habits, keeping track of what your network's actually working on, and making strong connections with like-minds. None of that happens perusing a static CV and that's the problem with CVs. They're terrible dead insects stuck in amber. We prefer real life ongoing interactions.
All the best from our Australian/English/German/Czech/Swiss team in Berlin!!
Hi Justin, thanks for stopping by. It would be nice if an alternative display of our achievements went along with a mainstream alternative to how people are hired/recruited. oDesk/Elance et al are making good strides but still a long way to go.
I'll be sure to keep an eye on how Somewhere develops. Let us know if you have any major news or developments.