Online "microresumes" are a hit for China's job seekers

BEIJING, May 21 (Xinhua) -- One hundred and forty words isn't a lot, but China's job seekers are cramming an entire career's worth of experience into a few sentences in order to help them find the perfect job.
"Microresumes" have become especially popular this May, as prospective university graduates are getting ready to enter the workforce. Graduate students are particularly likely to post their resumes on their microblogs.

"I am from the city of Qingdao city and I am looking for a temporary job to help me get by. I will take my post-graduation examinations next year," wrote a graduate student from Qingdao University in east China's Shandong Province on weibo.com, China's most popular microblogging site.

There were more than 17,000 microresumes posted on weibo.com as of last Friday.

College graduates aren't the only ones taking to their keyboards to find a new job. China's gainfully employed are also using microblogs to seek bigger and better opportunities. Ruan Xin, a senior manager with a company in China's economic hub of Shenzhen, recently posted a microresume in the hopes of finding a better job.

Ruan was quoted in a Thursday article in the China Youth Daily newspaper as saying that microresumes are an efficient way for both job seekers and employees to achieve their goals.

Direct and short introductions can quickly spread over the Internet, which helps employers save time when they're trying to find the right candidates, he said, adding that the speed at which short introductions can spread on the Internet also allows prospective job seekers to make more connections than they would with traditional resumes.

Several companies have begun looking at microblogs as an effective channel for recruitment. A recruiter for Alipay, China's largest third-party online payment service, said that Alipay has been recruiting employees via microblogs since 2009, according to the China Youth Daily article.

The recruiter says that microblogs can "yield twice the result with half the effort" in helping companies to recruit new employees.

New figures show that about 140 million people have signed up for accounts at weibo.com. Chinese media giant Sina, which owns weibo.com, estimates that the site will have 200 million registered users by the end of this year.

However, summing up an entire career in just 140 characters is a challenge for many job hunters. Some of the microresumes posted online seem to be posted just for their humorous content, rather than for the purpose of actually finding a job.

"Some microresumes are more like micronovels, just another instance of online entertainment," says Wang Yan, a college student majoring in journalism at Central China Normal University in Wuhan, the capital city of central China's Hubei Province.

Wang Dong, a human resources director working for an online advertising company, says that he is very cautious when dealing with microresumes. He believes that they aren't long enough to provide a suitable introduction for employers.

"Microresumes aren't necessarily suitable for every industry," Wang says. "Advertisers and media companies are the most suitable targets for this kind of recruitment."

He suggests that good microresumes should be clear and tightly focused, with links to the poster's personal website, if he or she has one. This can allow employers to understand the candidate more easily, he says.