Yes, LinkedIn is a massive company.
But it's most useful for professionals who use traditional resumes and want office jobs.
It recently launched a feature that lets its users upload a few samples of work, but there's no way to make a resume truly show off someone's talent.
Now there are a slew of startups scrambling to fill LinkedIn's gaping hole. They're trying to become a professional solution for people who don't have desk jobs, from athletes to artists.
A few promising solutions:
- Behance. If you're a designer, photographer, advertising creative, or film maker, the most important things you can show potential employers are samples of your work. Scott Belsky and his team at Behance have built up a big business giving these professionals a more creative solution than LinkedIn (see an example of a Behance resume below).
- Contently, a database of freelance and aspiring writers, recently released Contently Portfolio, a way for journalists to showcase their most impressive articles. LinkedIn allows you to link to your blog, but this is a more visual, all-encompassing alternative that can be sent to an employer along with a LinkedIn resume.
- QFive is a new web and mobile app that allows athletes to immediately upload clips and articles to their professional profiles so they can show a single link to recruiters. It's still in beta, but dozens of sports programs and thousands of athletes are registered, and the company is targeting rising high school stars who are just beginning their sports careers.
There are plenty of other creative jobs that still need filling too: chefs, singers, and anyone whose talent needs to be experienced rather than read. If LinkedIn wants to stay ahead of the curve, it might want to consider gobbling some of these startups up.
For example, here's my writing portfolio on Contently:
And here's a designer's portfolio on Behance:
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