Comparing Linkedin and Jobster profiles

Yesterday, Jason Goldberg announced some new features Jobster rolled out. The most exciting (for me) is the ability to have a personalised URL. So I got my choice URL http://www.jobster.com/people/gautam

Personalised URLs have been around for a long time at Linkedin and my profile there is available at http://www.linkedin.com/in/gautam

So I thought that comparing the jobster public profile with the linkedin public profile would be a useful exercise in case you have your profile in only one place or in none of them :-)

Both the comparisons are of the visible bit of the profile over the fold.

Of course, the focus of the two profiles are different. Jobster profiles are useful for job hunting or being hunted, whereas Linkedin profiles are meant for broader range of business networking (however, head hunting is becoming the most used activity on Linkedin, IMHO)

Exhibit 1:

My Linkedin Profile
Where Linkedin scores is:

• Highlighting Education - enabling alumni members and past classmates to contact and find you
  
• Highlighting the number of endorsements - Shows that people who have worked or interacted with you consider you reliable and have said something publicly.
• The usefulness of clarifying multiple current roles possible.
• The ability to showcase an industry, in my case it's "management consulting"
• The location is quite visible under the name and designation.

Exhibit 2:
My Jobster Profile

• Jobster enables people to view your "superstar tags" to quickly understand your core skills. The fact that these are restricted to 5 means you have to choose the most important ones.
  

• You can upload a profile/resume (either a word doc or a pdf document) for people to download and read.
• You can subscribe to a person's answers to "questions" by a RSS feed.
• Pictures can be uploaded on to your profile. While some disagree that pictures have any place on a business related profile, I think the presence does not hamper it in any way.
• People can leave you messages or 'notes' and that is much better than attempting to contact people through connections in common as in Linkedin.

The big downer for me is that Jobster profiles are US specific and locations like India don't get updated. I guess Linkedin is much ahead than Jobster in globalising. Linkedin also uses the endorsements in a much better way.

However, Jobster gives higher visibility to a person's employment status (for example, mine says, "Open for projects") from "Hire Me" to "Happily Employed" to "My group is hiring". You can also see the job history in a glance by clicking on the "View a summary of Gautam's experiences" while Linkedin helps you articulate what you did in a particular role much better.

So if you want to network and don't have the patience to maintain a blog, put in little effort and open profiles on both Linkedin and Jobster.

Be found.