With so much business and networking being done solely online today, many have taken the opportunity to post their resumes on websites that offer this service.  Rather than e-mail a Word .doc to a potential employer, sending a link to your online hosted resume page is an acceptable alternative.

There are quite a few ways to use the web to create or host your resume/CV, the most well known of course being LinkedIn. While LinkedIn offers an online hosted resume in combination with a social networking experience, the display of LinkedIn profile pages isn't the best looking out there, and you need to be a member to login and see someone's "full profile," which may contain important information.  LinkedIn also offers a .pdf export of your resume/cv, but this is mainly plain text and not so pleasing to the eye.

Take a look at my LinkedIn profile page for an example:

Another resume website, emurse, offers more display options for your resume, but once again, they are mostly plain text. The best part of emurse is that the export options are plentiful, including .pdf, html, .doc, .odt and even RSS. These are surely helpful, but once again, the display is rather dull, even with the addition of some new resume styles in the past few months.

View my emurse page here:

I've been on both LinkedIn and Emurse for a few years now, and it was a friend's request to help out with his MS Word resume that sparked me to search for a better option. That's one of the greatest things about the web today, there are always options when it comes to acheiving something.

So, I came across a site called VisualCV, which offers a similar service as LinkedIn and emurse in that they provide free hosted online resumes that jobseekers can add to their blogs, email signatures, or if need be..,heir Word .docs. VisualCV struck me because, well, they truly offer a visually appealing online resume solution, totally blowing the competition out of the water in this sense. LinkedIn may have more users than any of the other sites, but they don't have the option for people to create nice looking resume pages. Not like this:

While there are quite a few background color and image options, the real benefit with VisualCV is that you can upload your portfolio images, videos, etc.... and then have the option of linking each portfolio piece to it's corresponding website or Youtube video. While this might not work for all job types, such as an accountant who doesn't have any visual work to display, this is huge for any graphic/web/3d designer with portfolio examples they'd like to show on a resume site such as this. Also, the .pdf export contains each image and hyperlink, which easily creates a file a potential employee can attach to an email for a job and easily get to all your work.

While creating my resume, I had the option to pull in all of my LinkedIn data into VisualCV, which made it super simple for someone like me that already has a LinkedIn profile to get the same information on another site. This was a nice feature and allowed me to finish the entire page within about 15 minutes. (most of that time was adding my portfolio thumbnail images)

I was surprised that this service provides such a better looking resume solution than LinkedIn. Addition of a profile picture, logo, and modules that can be easily moved within your profile page are other nice additions that seperate VisualCV from the rest of the pack. For anyone that's on LinkedIn, or especially anyone in the creative industry, this is the best option for hosting your online resume, imho.

View my VisualCV Resume here.

Thanks to Mikey G for needing resume help and prompting me to find out about this site. And thanks to makeuseof.com for being the best web app blog out there, bar none.