eManagr News

As we finish the overview of eManagr’s main ideas (teams here, estimates here), we come to the user profile.

Always remember, eManagr isn’t Facebook.

Keeping in mind that communities aren’t competitions, if you wanted to think of community websites as a competition, then generally, you “win” when you have collected more connections (friends, followers, or similar) than other people you know.  That goes for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and dozens of social media websites.

For eManagr, it doesn’t matter who claims to be a friend.  We don’t record your communications and don’t prominently announce how many members are on your teams.  Most people wouldn’t even notice if half their so-called friends vanished into thin air.

We also don’t give you a “reputation,” like eBay and many bulletin boards have.  Measurements like that are artificial, because you don’t know how the person earned their five stars, seven thousand karma points, recommendations, or other representations of brown-nosing.  It may have been reciprosity or just good nature.

So, eManagr ignores those things.  Instead, we focus on what makes you unique and a potential candidate for a project.

We ask you who you are.  This is typical and unavoidable.  A solid overview of your experience tells a potential employer what kind of job might interest you.  It also gives you the opportunity to display basic communications skills and brag a little about your abilities.

Note the self-rated skills.  Our experience has been that interviewers want to ask for such self-assessment.  Lacking the means to test your abilities and honesty, this is on the honor system.  However, since we track your estimates (see below), it will be quite obvious if you’re good or bad at your job.

Second, we (not you) keep track of and talk about what you’ve done.  As an impartial third party, we can show an employer exactly what kinds of projects you have been involved with during your time using eManagr, and your role in the project.

Third, we provide up to the minute information on the number of tasks you currently have in the air.  This number might be misleading in fringe cases, but it will generally indicate your engagement; a small number of open tasks suggests that you are near the end of the project, while a larger number suggests that you will be busy for the forseeable future.

Finally, we show the accuracy of your estimates to date, using an average weighted more to the present.  History shows where you have been and number of tasks shows where you are, but your accuracy tells people how well you’re likely to perform.

As mentioned, this serves as a statement of how good you are at your job, based on how well you hit your scheduled deadlines.  Mediocre and bad workers rarely hit their marks.  Excellent workers already know where the project will end up.

That’s the basic tour of what you see on the profile pages.  To a great extent, our goal was to have a “living résumé.”  It’s not quite finished yet, but it seems to get the job done.

Feel free to point people to your profile as a résumé, in fact.  Anybody with an eManagr account can visit:

http://www.emanagr.com/users/yourloginname

to visit your profile.

We’re currently planning on adding to the profile.  Please contact us and tell us what works for you and what does not.  At the top of our list is an optional public profile for Professional users, but we’re understandably curious as to what our users think.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 12:00 and is filed under Concepts, Features, Overview. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.