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It used to be that the right education, years of experience and simply being good at what you are doing were enough to make a career. But just like the market of consumer goods and services, the professional market has been growing bigger and more diverse, and eventually became saturated with smart, ambitious, and skillful people. Now, in order to stand out in the crowd and be remembered by employers, you need to have a strong personal brand: an image, associated with your name that communicates your professional values and personality, strengths and uniquenesses. Just like any consumer brand, your personal brand has an equity: a potential that translates into salary, future promotions and new job offers, trust and reputation, etc. And just like with consumer brands, your personal brand equity can now also be measured and quantified. Meet Career Score !
The new start-up, MyWebCareer (currently in beta), came up with a way to convert your online career and work -related footprints into your professional brand score, dubbed Career Score. Their proprietary algorithm analyzes and scores over 150 semantic and sociometric data points collected on the Internet (including your Linkedin profile, and Twitter, Facebook and Quora accounts), and summarizes it in one single score. Similar to FICO’s credit score, individual career scores can range between 392 and 850, and can be used for both reference and comparison purposes.
Naturally, I started by connecting to my Linkedin profile, and my initial Career Score was 685. When I added my Twitter account, the score went up to 718. I then (reluctantly) added my Facebook account, and, to my surprise, my score went up to 761. Connecting to my Quora account resulted in my final score of 774.
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In My Analysis section, I was given recommendations on how to improve my career score. While some of them made sense (“You have no recommendations on Linkedin”, no search results related to a couple of internships) and some were irrelevant, in my opinion, to my career (e.g., “You have no photo associated with your Linkedin Profile”, or no Facebook connections with colleagues from previous workplaces). There also seemed to be a glitch with Quora plug-in: MyWebCareer indicated that I don’t have any followers on Quora (I am currently followed by 3 people), that I don’t follow anyone (I currently follow 3 people), I have not posted any answers (I posted 2 answers related to statistics and quantified-self).
The Premium analytics (not available yet) promises more interesting and actionable (in my opinion) reports, including
- in-depth analysis of each of 150 data points that were used to compute my Career score
- comparative metrics (my profile versus people with the same position, other people in my professional network, industry, geographic region)
- relevant job postings, and more.
My new score will be automatically updated and e-mailed to me in a month. Let’s hope MyWebCareer will fix that bug with Quora by then! In the meantime, I will look for a prettier picture for my Linkedin profile!
