My very first curriculum vitae was typed by hand using carbon paper. That gave me two shots at a job before I had to type it again. I’ve not used a resumé as such for several years now, but the most recent iterations were PDF files containing lots of images … and lots of links.

Three years ago I started a project to create an online CV service. Although the project started well it foundered for lack of time – which is really another way of saying I didn’t have the investment backing needed to bring it to fruition. That’s a little sad, because I’m sure other initiatives are going to jump into that space and claim it. For that reason I’m not going to list the full details of my design, but it’s something I’ve given a lot of thought to over several years. Why? Because I think that’s the future.

The advantages of a well-designed online CV system are significant. It would allow candidates to easily maintain both standard and customised resumés and determine who can see these by generating custom links. That approach allows to candidates to see who’s taken the time to read the curriculum vitae, how much of it was read and how many times it was revisited.

In such a system a candidate can assign specified access and distribution rights to a recruitment agency, which need no longer maintain an in-house filing system for CVs: it can search the online repository within those candidates it’s acting for. A recruitment agency or HR department can easily prepare a folio of relevant documents for presentation to the employer … and deliver them as simply as a link in an email message.

And employers? Employers would be able to sort, comment on, refer, score and filter the resumés in a folio even more easily than dealing with a pile of paper. And those actions would be entirely private – invisible to both the recruiter and the candidates.

It sounds like nirvana. Although not a lot like Nirvana.

A fully-featured web application for curriculum vitae management isn’t trivial to design or to build. But no significant wheels need to be reinvented in the process and the resulting system would be a steady earner. Candidates could create and maintain a single standard resumé for free, but pay for premium features such as multiple customised CVs and view tracking. Recruitment agency and employer rates could reflect some of the cost savings accruing to them from using the system. There’s money in it – and a commercial advantage for those who adopt it.

You may doubt that there’s an online curriculum vitae in your future. But I have no doubt this will become the standard method of resumé delivery within very few years.