Dan Shapiro

I was reviewing a student resume today.  It was quite outstanding – no hesitation about recommending the candidate highly.  If there was one thing that I could nitpick about, though, it’s that I like to see a resume that includes a bit of an online footprint.

For a developer, point me to your github or stackoverflow account.  For an MBA, let’s see a clever website you banged out that’s delivering a couple hundred bucks a month of adwords to your bank account.  For a marketing grad, show off your blog or your twitter account that may not have much in the way of useful content but still manages to have a ridiculous number of followers.

A momentary digression: Lately, I have been experimenting with www.gist.com and www.rapportive.com.  I’m still learning to get the most out of them, but I can safely say that if you’re not using at least one of them, you’re a little bit stupider than you should be.  Don’t take it personally: this category of tool is, quite simply, synapse augmentation.  If you have it, you’re a little sharper, a little more able to connect the dots, a bit more on the ball than if you don’t.

One of their cool party tricks is a little known API capability.  Did you know you can look up someone’s user account on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and elsewhere by email address?

Right.  So I didn’t google this guy (and if I did I wouldn’t have found him, since his name wasn’t anywhere on his twitter account).

I just clicked the big blue button right next to his email that linked me to the twitter account that was tied to his address.

I’ll spare you the results, but suffice it to say: if you’re building a secret Twitter account, be sure to use a secret email address for it too, OK?

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