Emurse

Lots of Emurse.com updates coming in the near future, but first it’s my pleasure to announce preliminary availability of our public api. It’s still early and not everything is 100% open to the public yet, but we’re looking for folks interested in poking around and testing for us.

If you’re a developer and have any interest, comment below and we’ll reach out to ya with the goods

You may have noticed that we released a new feature on web resumes this past weekend. The “Contact” tab allows potential employers to request your contact information. This feature was designed with job seeker privacy in mind.

Here’s the way it works: An employer/recruiter can request contact information from your Emurse.com website. After verifying that their email is legit, an accept/decline message is sent your way. It’s completely anonymous, and information is only shared if the request is accepted. Now you can keep your e-mail hidden while at the same time making yourself available to potential new opportunities.

We’ve also juiced up our web server to handle a bit more traffic — hopefully this will increase the responsiveness of the site and make the experience even stronger. Let us know if anything seems whacky though.

We’ve recently refreshed the top portion of web resumes. This should provide for a more polished experience as well as give us a bit more flexibility as we roll out new functionality. Check out Ryan M’s resume as an example!

If you have yet to host your resume as a website on Emurse, you should most certainly check it out. By hosting your resume as a website, you’ll gain exposure to millions of employers and recruiters utilizing major search engines for their hiring. You will be notified whenever someone views your resume. We’ll even tell you how they found your web resume. It’s really slick.

Premium users have access to detailed statistics on their web resumes that truly allow you to take control of your “digital identity.” It’s only a few bucks a month ($25 a year) and it helps support the site you know and love so well

Thanks go out to Jasmyn and Kevin who both sent in reports regarding a rather ugly bug relating to the Distribution functionality of Emurse. This issue has been fixed, but in an effort to maintain transparency, we decided to post something to the blog about it.

Some of you may have noticed some fairly wonky behavior regarding distribution starting towards the end of March. This behavior only affected a minority of users, but in a pretty nasty way. Resumes sends were extremely backlogged due to a bug in the resume attachment code. As soon as this bug was spotted and fixed, it caused Emurse to “catch up” on it’s mailing, only, without some of the Attachments.

Ugly.

Here’s how we are preventing it from happening again.

The back end for resume distribution was almost completely rewritten, and will be tested thoroughly over the next few days. Resumes should now be sent out in under 3 minutes under normal load. We’ve set up a few “watch dogs” to keep an eye on this sort of thing, just in case something were to happen again (even to a small percentage of users). This way, we will be alerted to the situation quickly.

Again, we really apologize for the troubles, and as always, we are available to answer any questions directly via e-mail.

You may have noticed that Emurse.com has been undergoing a design change over the last couple of weeks. The next phase of this change was just pushed live. Let us know your thoughts!

We have just pushed live a rather large redesign to the internal interface. We are actively seeking feedback and bug reports from all of this, so please drop us a line and let us know what you think!

Here is a rundown of the changes:

• Much wider screen use, way more white space, and a new page header.
• The “Send” tab has been consolidated to a “Distribution” sub-tab under the new “Resume” tab (the equivalent of “Edit” before)
• In the “Send” tabs place, you will find “Website”. By promoting Website from the Share tab to its own tab allows us to expand on the functionality offered. Website profiles have been moved here as well.
• A new “Network” tab has been created to house a “Contacts” feature. We added Network contacts quietly a few weeks back for testing and response has been fairly strong. Expect some more neat things in the near future here.
• The “Account” link at the top of the interface has been promoted to its own area under the “Home” tab. This should help make it much easier to find.

Please let us know your thoughts. We are striving to find the right balance between Web2.0 and “professional” as we expand our service. With your help we are confident we will nail it

Expect more big things soon.

We’ve just pushed live a pretty big change to web resumes.

The first change that you’ll notice right away is a completely new look and feel. Resumes are about putting your best foot forward, and we thought we could clean it up some. These pretty new things should also be better optimized for search engines, meaning more employers coming your way.

We’ve also added a new “tab” to your web site titled “Profile.” This profile is account wide and is used to help better match candidates to qualified job listings. It also gives you a chance to present yourself on a personal level. Include links to your portfolio, pictures or LinkedIn account. Answer common interview questions and fill out an “About Me” section. The cool thing is, everything is completely optional. The more you answer, the more things that will show up. It’s pretty flexible.

This material is derived from countless conversations with employers and recruiters to get a feel for the common “pre-qualifying” questions that they ask job seekers. The more you’re able to answer their questions before they contact you, the more likely you’ll have a beneficial, to the point conversation. After all, that’s what we want. Our mission is to improve your job hunt

How to create an online profile: After signing in to Emurse, visit the “Profile” area of the Home tab. Answer questions, move to the next section by using the left hand navigation. Save your profile using the “Save Profile” button. Some information is given out on your Emurse web site, while some of it is used to better our relevant jobs engine. This feature is beta, so any feedback you might have is extremely appreciated :).

Updated: One of our users just pointed out that some of the hResume implementations on the premium templates are a little off now. We’ve added the issue to our list and will try to get it resolved soon. Pardon our dust, we’ve got a lot going on in developer land Thanks!

Couple of small things.. Joey S. e-mailed us a request this week for E-mail confirmations when using the Send feature. This was implemented this evening. Basically, when you send an e-mail using Emurse, we’ll send you an e-mail copy of the message along with the attachment sent. This will help improve your record keeping as well as give you a bit of peace of mind. Thanks for the feedback Joe!

We also have completed the roll out of Locations in resume view notifications. If you are a premium user and have notifications turned on for your Web Page, the notification will now include an approximate location of the person viewing your resume. We had a few users request this, and we’re excited about the added functionality!

Enjoy

Oh, and a Happy New Year while we’re at it!

Our beta group has gotten a lot of use from spell check already, and though we were tempted to hold it back until we get 100% of the kinks worked out, we decided that it was time to push it out to everyone.

It’s English only for now, but the framework can be extended if there is enough demand. Please report any issues as you find them

We’ve also completed our latest server upgrade. Things should be a bit snappier in places, which will hopefully improve the performance of the auto-save functionality. Job postings on the home tab now go directly to the job itself, not to the indeed page, which is also pretty cool. Tons of small bug fixes and some security polish were thrown into the mix as well.

We’re still collecting names for the next beta test, and also testimonials for our blog. If you haven’t checked out the blog lately, hit it up. Lots of changes and fresh content.

How To Spell Check Your Emurse Resume: In the top right corner of the Edit Content screen, you will see a link that reads “Check Spelling”. Click it and follow along with the dialogs.

We’ve just rolled out to all users better “bot” filtering on web resumes. Basically, this means you will only get an e-mail notification (if you have it turned on) if it’s an actual human viewing your web resume. Hopefully this will cut down on the annoyances some users face by having a popular resume indexed on google.

In regards to the beta program — holy cow did we get a lot of responses. If you haven’t heard from us yet, you will, just be patient as we catalog all the requests. We’ve already added a few, and will probably wait a week or two (holidays might cloud it a bit) until we get the next feature-to-test out the door.

We also have two internships available. We’re looking for folks majoring or studying Marketing, HR or MIS. I’ve received 3 applications through other channels so far, but wanted to open it up to our users as well. It’s an unpaid, scholastic type of thing. E-mail service@emurse.com with your Emurse web resume and a small writing sample.