Recently we launched a new feature that you might think is a little strange. On Somewhere we talk about a future in which we won’t need CVs. We talk about the future of work, and how the future of work is already here. So why did we release a feature aiming at building Visual CVs?
The answer is behavioural change.
Asking people to share their work is still a confusing proposition. We’re blind to this, we realised, because we talk about this every day and, to us, the value in sharing what you do is obvious. By frequently sharing our work on Somewhere, we’ve sent out a big signal about how we work. And from that we built up a talent pool of people who we can talk to, learn from, and work with as we grow. Hiring will always be a tough problem, but we’ve eased our own path by lighting fires and letting people come over to see what we’re up to.
For the majority, though, that’s a complex solution.
So we decided to offer our hand to anyone willing to join us. We firmly believe this is the right path, and we want everyone to come along. We could either make a lot of noise about our idea, and wait for everyone to show up, or we could row back on our ideals and pick up as many people as we could by mapping out a route.
Visual CVs are less an admission that CVs aren’t dead yet, it’s a way for us to ease people into the idea of sharing their work. By creating a Visual CV people get to experience the value in sharing what you do all day. By answering Provocations about yourself, we’re helping people to get used to the idea of answering questions that aren’t explicitly about their skills and experience, but still provide a meaningful insight into how they work.
To draw some lines with my games-developer past, I like to think of our Visual CV tools as a single-player experience, before the multi-player experience of what Somewhere represents to us.
We place a huge value on the community that we’ve gained, more so that the technology we’ve built or the processes we’ve put in place. But, joining a community of pioneers is frightening, even off-putting. Visual CVs form part of our answer to that problem.
We know that the future of work is here, and we’d like to invite people in to share our understanding. Somewhere represents an inclusive community of pioneers, and we want to be more popular, more understood, because then we’ll get to meet even more of you.
If we truly want to see how the world works, we have to at least try to meet everyone half way. So come join us. Do things, tell people.
