LinkedIn on Facebook

This is quite an interesting move. Facebook is going a wee bit more professional. Paul tweeted the other day he’d like Facebook to have a CV application (or something to that likes) and now there is. What is even more interesting is that you can import your LinkedIn public profile as your resume. Even better still is the way it is done as it parses your public profile page and uses the hResume Microformat to do so as LinkedIn does not have an API as yet. Goes to show, who actually needs an API if you’ve got Microformats.

The application is called Professional Profile. After you installed it (and used the Skip button ), you can see who in your network also uses it. Somehow this counts as a recommendation? Not entirely sure how that works, but we’ll see…

The main thing is the My Resume tab. If you click on it, you get to your resume page. You can select to either upload your CV in MS Word doc format or if you have a LinkedIn profile that is pretty much up to date, you can enter the URL to your public profile and click the Retrieve button:

Once it retrieved your LinkedIn resume you should have a page with all your relevant work experience and work history provided your LinkedIn profile is up to date:

There is a couple of other nice features such as you can search people’s resumes. So if you need to recruit a specific skill, you can search for people with the Professional Profile installed! This could make Facebook quite a valuable tool for companies looking to recruit people, especially if you consider that there is more people on Facebook than there is CV’s in any eRecruitment site’s database!

This is great not only for Facebook as a professional networking tool, but also for demonstrating the practicality of Microformats!

3 Comments to "LinkedIn on Facebook"

• Paul Walsh said: On 11/01/2007 at 9:04 am

  I like it because you can import your LinkedIn profile and edit without worrying about what happens on the LinkedIn side. This means I no longer need LinkedIn to show my business profile (which most people know to find on my Web site anyway)

  NB. I wouldn’t have installed the app if it synced with LinkedIn so that was a good move.

  I’m confident the recommendations are carried over from LinkedIn and has nothing to do with Facebook.

• Stii said: On 11/01/2007 at 10:12 am

  Ah, thanx Paul, for clearing that up! That is awesome then. I’m not sure I agree with you about the syncing from linked in though. I would have prefered that it automatically updates it as I then only have to maintain it in one place. Maybe they should have a option so you could choose.

• Henre said: On 11/02/2007 at 1:39 pm

  This seems like a fantastic app with one glaring downside. Not syncing both ways. I’m with you Stii, we’re all searching for a way to update one social network that would proliferate the information across the others.

  I’m still adding the app though, but I reckon more consideration needed to be paid in the development. Maybe an option to sync or not. lol, just saw the last part of your comment Stii, so we agree then.

  Damn, just read your entire comment. I could’ve just as well copied yours.

Spit it out!

Filed in: Semantic Web, Social Web, Web 2.0 by: Stii