The past few years have seen the social web truly take off. Activity streams are replacing email and conversations are happening all the time, all across the internet. People are now more connected, more informed, more knowledgeable and more adaptable than ever before. What this means for the online recruiting world is that for every recruiter who has a job posting with a list of pre-qualifications; there are hundreds or thousands of people who would be a perfect fit, whether their resume says so or not.

Until the birth of Linkedin in 2003, the online recruiting and job board industry was dominated by a few key players; namely, Monster and Career Builder. Recruiters posted jobs, candidates applied for jobs, and sometimes a match was made. That’s it, there was no interaction, no getting to know each other, just a job posting and a resume.

Linkedin recognized that this model was not going to work much longer, so they introduced premium services that let recruiters search for, contact and learn more about candidates. Since then, the smartest organizations have slowly realized that a generic job posting will, at best, get them a generic employee. Today, if a company is only recruiting through the major job boards, they’re probably a company you don’t want to work for.

Today, the online recruiting world is officially going social, whether recruiters are ready or not. My company, Brazen Careerist, is providing recruiters the tools to see past a traditional resume to create real relationships with tomorrow’s leaders through conversations, and to get a glimpse at our members thoughts and ideas that can translate to future action. Last week we launched Social Resumes to provide tomorrow’s leaders with the tools to showcase the ideas and abilities they display every day when they participate in conversations online. The goal is to make sure our members never have to settle for a job that makes them want to jump off a bridge every day.

We’ve built our product offering and our company based on two ideas. The first idea is that people now have the power.

Despite the recession, we no longer live in a world where people feel lucky to have a job. People are all free agents, they change jobs frequently, they drop out of the workforce to start companies and they take time off to watch their kids grow up. Demanding relevant experience and telling people they should be excited to work for your company in a generic company description is a recipe for disaster.

When people have the power, recruiters have to meet them on their turf and engage them in conversation. I can’t tell you how angry I get when I see job descriptions that brag about their “great team environment” and list “superior execution and operational capabilities” as a key qualification.

When people have the power, you do not have permission to tell them that you are looking for specific experience or provide a canned description of your corporate culture. First you have to introduce yourself, join a conversation, and provide value. Then you have permission to tell someone why your job is a perfect fit, the same way you would tell a friend.

The second idea is that people make the best matches.

According to the Wall Street Journal, 90% of jobs are filled through employee referrals. The number sounds high, but when you really think about it, this makes sense. People make the best matches. Employees want to work with friends, and they’ll happily take a $5,000 referral bonus to do someone a favor – if they really believe the job is a good fit.

No search engine or algorithm can compete with a human connection when it comes to matching. There are just too many variables in place. Monster recently launched a pretty impressive Semantic search engine to try to make better matches. The technology is amazing, light years ahead of its competitors. But the truth is that the future of online recruiting is not simply in search engines. It’s in human connections and conversations.

The only problem is that all of these great ideas get lost in the shuffle of real time status updates, endless blog archives, and short attention spans. If I wanted to show someone what my online persona was all about, I would have to dig up a bunch of old links and point them all over the internet. It works, but it’s certainly not efficient.

Today, we launched Social Resumes to combat this problem and to make your everyday use of social media truly useful for your career.

A Social Resume is the first of its kind, active, live resume that lets you showcase your top ideas from around the web and share them in one convenient place. It’s a resume that highlights your thoughts and future plans as much as your past experience.

Thousands of people are already engaging in conversations and feeding blog posts and tweets into their Brazen Careerist profiles. Now you can scan all of this activity, determine what best represents your professional brand, and add it directly to your Social Resume. If you don’t want to dig through old posts or you have some great ideas that aren’t on Brazen Careerist yet, you can go directly to your Social Resume and add a top idea in the box provided.

Here’s a screen shot of my Social Resume to illustrate:

We’ve been beta testing Social Resumes for the past week, and I’m already blown away by the ideas people are sharing and the different ways everyone is using their Social Resume.

Emily Jasper browsed through her activity and added her blog post “Hi My name is Emily and I’m pro corporate” as one of her top ideas. People can now go directly to Emily’s Social Resume to read all 12 comments and join the conversation right there.

Dale Beermann took a different angle and decided to enter some ideas directly into his Social Resume. Dale’s #3 top idea says,

“Engineering is only a means to determine and achieve a particular goal, not the goal in and of itself.”

He makes a great point.

Ellen Nordahl took an even different approach. Ellen gave a quick explanation of one of her favorite blog posts, “Starting over in the same city” and then linked directly to the post. Readers can now visit Ellen’s blog to join the conversation, or leave a comment on her Social Resume.

The coolest thing about your Social Resume is that it can be used however you choose. You have 10 chances to show the world the ideas that best compliment your traditional resume and represent your professional brand.

Traditional resumes show people your experience; what you’ve done, where you’ve worked and what you’ve accomplished. This is all useful information, but it doesn’t provide any insight into how you think or what you plan to do in the future. You show the world these things every day when you engage in conversations online. Now you have a place to showcase it all.

To learn more about Social Resume’s and see a tutorial video on how to use them, check out our Social Resume reference page.

Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic, claims that despite the common misconception that entrepreneurs are a certain “type” of person, most entrepreneurs are not simply born with the ability to start and build businesses, they learn how to do this over time. It’s the classic nature vs. nurture argument, and many well respected people including the likes of Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, are bullish on nature.

However, Wadwha’s survey of 549 successful entrepreneurs proves otherwise. More than 50% of these entrepreneurs were the first in their family to start a business, only a quarter caught the entrepreneurial bug when in college, and very few were running lemonade stand businesses when they were in diapers.

Personally, I didn’t know I wanted to be an entrepreneur until late in college when an entrepreneur friend of mine told me he thought I’d make a good one. My parents were very interested in their jobs and often dinner conversation turned to work, but they did not run their own businesses. And sure, I may have sold Gatorade that my mother bought for a huge mark up one time when I was 8 years old, but I certainly wasn’t running a lemonade stand monopoly.

I guess I’m a lot like the people Wadhwa refers to above. One day I woke up and knew I had no interest in working for someone for the rest of my life. I needed excitement, I needed passion and I needed to do something that mattered. Now, I can’t see myself ever doing something else.

As long as you have a great idea and you’re willing to work harder than you can possibly imagine, anyone can be an entrepreneur.

What do you guys think? Are entrepreneurs born or can they be made?

Personally, I think Facebooks recent shift in privacy settings was a smart move. For the social web to truly be “social,” data must be freely available to everyone.

Twitter understood this when developing their service and we understood it when deciding to make Brazen Careerist open. Also, as services like Twitter, Blogging and Brazen Careerist have become more and more prevalent, people seem to be less concerned with online privacy. I’m conscious of what I say online, and I have nothing to hide, so privacy is a non factor for me.

But the real reason I think it’s a smart move for Facebook is because opening the site will improve their bottom line. When you open everything up, people become much more aware of what they post and what they don’t post online. And when 350 million people are consciously monitoring what they post, the number of beer bonging photos and mentions of last night’s illegal escapades will go way down. When these things go way down, advertising rates go way up..

However, this post by Greg Tracy made me think of the issue in a whole new way. Tracy argues that privacy absolutely matters for Facebook, and Twitter and blogging are terrible data points. They are poor data points because Facebook is different. Facebook is supposed to be an online extension of your everyday offline life. Offline, you have private conversations with your neighbors on the sidewalk or with your coworkers at the water cooler. These conversations would never be shouted for a neighbor down the street to hear you or for your boss in the corner office to find out what's going on.

Tracy goes on to say that people aren’t changing and Facebook will not make them change. Facebook is merely a new medium to do the same things we have always done. Twitter and Blogging are very different. Twitter and Blogging are not supposed to be an extension of your offline life. They are meant for public consumption, just like newspapers, magazines and television are meant for public consumption.

Tracy makes an excellent point. Facebook could be making a huge mistake by following the lead of Twitter and other new, open sites. But, it could also very well be that they recognize there is no money in being an extension of offline life, and they are making the smartest business decision they can by downplaying privacy.

If Facebook truly wants to be the place where you live your life online the same way you live your life offline, they are making a mistake by downplaying privacy issues. You can change the medium, but you can’t change how people fundamentally behave.

However, if Facebook believes that they are not merely a new medium to do what you have always done, but instead they are a new media tool designed to give people a brand new way to behave and communicate, then Facebook is on the right track.

I’m sure Facebook will go whatever route can make them the most money, but whichever way they decide to go, they’re going to piss some people off, and they’re going to leave the door wide open for a new service to come along and fill in where Facebook does not.

What do you guys think? Is privacy a major issue for you? Do you agree with Zuckerberg?

Whether or not these sites can help you recruit talent is not really a question. Of course they can. But because these sites are not built for recruiting and do not offer products to aid the recruiting process, it’s not an easy task. There are hundreds of ways to source candidates through these networks and if you spend enough time on them, you’ll find the talent your organization is looking for.

Unfortunately, sorting through all of the crap on Facebook and making sense of the rapid fire tweets on Twitter to find the right candidates takes a ton of time. Considering most recruiters are hard pressed to find an extra second in their day, it can be difficult to justify giving social recruiting a try.

One thing a company could do is ask their recruiters to work more hours. Of course, this won’t work. Recruiters will leave for another company so they can have a life.

Another option might be to have social media specialists. Put your least experienced, most tech savvy recruiters in charge of social media and don’t have them bother with phone calls or emails. Again, probably not a good idea. Phone calls and emails still work; social media will not change this.

What you should do is listen to the advice from two recent posts by John Sullivan on ERE.net. The author tells companies to stop worrying about how to get recruiters to use social media for recruiting and instead get your recruiters to start thinking of themselves as managers and organizers, responsible for getting your employees on the front lines.

Sullivan says, “Social media erupted as tools to facilitate interaction, and interaction in too many aspects of one’s life can be time consuming and exhausting! Fortunately there is an answer to this problem: don’t do it alone. Use employees to build relationships, and then take advantage of those relationships!”

There are hundreds of millions of people on social networks, and each of your employees is probably connected to thousands of them. It’s already a proven fact that the number one source of new hires is referrals. If you want to improve your situation and attract top talent, your organization should be focused on how to get even more new hires through referrals.

When you really think about it, social media is built for this; it’s the ultimate referral tool. Social media is based on relationships, conversation and existing connections. When you have those things, the need for cold calls, random job postings and advanced search techniques goes way down.

If you really want to capitalize on “social recruiting,” figure out how to make each of your employees your #1 recruiter, than sit back and watch your successful new hires go through the roof.

For some great tips on how your organization can do this, check out John Sullivan’s most recent post on ERE.

Hsieh replied,

“For most companies (work-life balance) implies that work must suck so much you need a life on the outside. At Zappos we’re more focused on creating a lifestyle. We don’t think of it as one or the other. Most Zappos employees leave work and hang out with other Zappos employees.”

He’s right. While it’s usually done with good intentions, focusing on work-life balance is killing your corporate culture. Like Hsieh says, the mere term implies that work must be so terrible that you need to stop thinking about it the second you walk out the door.

This was a great philosophy – in 1890. In the days of 8 hour shifts on an assembly line, everyone had work-life balance. When the machines shut down, there were no widgets to be made; you couldn’t work if you wanted to. And there was no point in dreaming about how to get the job done better or faster or how to beat the competition when the machine dictated everything you did.

Its 2009 and things are different now. We live in a knowledge based world. The companies who dream, innovate and change the world are the ones that win. No one is making world changing innovations in 8 hour shifts, 5 days a week. Ideas come in your sleep and breakthroughs come at happy hours.

Start-ups are doomed the second people start talking about work-life balance and begin thinking of each other as nothing more than “coworkers.” They need to be best friends, they need to work around the clock, or at least be thinking about work around the clock, and they need to kick and scream and fight together, just to survive. So start-ups create a culture where work is a lifestyle. Zappos is well past the start-up phase, but they’ve managed to do this too.

Stop worrying about work-life balance or how to give people as much time off as possible, and start thinking about how to create an environment where people never want to take time off. Not because they’re scared or intimidated, but because they can’t think of anything in the world they would rather be doing than working with their peers and friends to achieve a common goal.

The employees you really want aren’t looking for a job, they’re looking for a lifestyle. Create one for them.

You might be thinking, why does Brazen Careerist keep changing what they're doing? My response to that question is, we didn't really have a choice. Over the past six months we've listened to the community and we've listened to the marketplace. And what they both keep telling us is that young professionals (Gen Y) are looking for a professional home on the internet.

On the community side, our groups feature has continued to take off and members now think of Brazen Careerist as a full scale social network. New members are joining every day and engagement on the site is increasing dramatically.

When I read the bios on some of these new profiles, I'm blown away. We have successful entrepreneurs, marketers, freelancers, IT workers, and more. And they're all driven, motivated and accomplished. Our members now think of us as a professional network, and it became glaringly obvious that we had to give them what they wanted.

On the other side, the marketplace needs a young professional social network. Here's why.

Facebook is home base. We all know this. Facebook is where you share your personal information, send messages to established offline friends, and browse through photos from the good ol' days of college. Facebook is not where you meet new people, build a network, and have work related conversations.

Linkedin is the dominant player in the online career network space. It's where you should have a professional profile because it's where your boss and your future boss probably hang out. But the average age on Linkedin is 40, and the profiles emphasize experience – something people in their twenties are a little short on.

When we looked at all of these factors, we realized, there's a huge niche that needs to be filled – a professional network for Gen Y – and our community that started as a little blog aggregator is in the perfect position to fill that niche. So, with this launch, that's what we've done.

First of all, we gave the site a complete facelift, improved the user experience and made just about everything customizable to you – the way a social networking site should be. But most importantly, we completely revamped our profiles to emphasize ideas over experience. The new profiles aggregate everything you say or do on Brazen Careerist. From blog posts to group chatter to profile updates, the new profiles display all of this activity in a feed to show that your experience and background aren't the only indicators of success. Your ideas and potential matter too.

The other part of our profiles showcase standard resume information including work experience and education to give a complete picture of who you are and what you have accomplished – even if it's not 20+ years of experience in a single field.

On a personal note, the past few months have been crazy at the Brazen Careerist office. We've pulled countless all nighters, we've had our fair share of arguments, we've had plenty of great discussions, and Photis, our lead developer even managed to lock himself out of his office an hour before our final load balance test, only to pull a MacGyver and climb through the roof to get to his computer. (This was hilarious, you can see photos here) All in all, it's been everything a pre-launch period is supposed to be and we've all had a great time doing it.

So please, check out the site, create a profile if you don't have one and let us know what you think because community feedback is what made the site what it is today, and it's what will make the site great in the coming months!

Take Facebook for example. Mark Zuckerberg didn't invent social networking. He stole the idea from a couple of twins from Harvard who hired him to help build a website based on an idea that they stole from a company called Friendster. Six years later, Zuckerberg is a billionaire, the twins made cash by suing Zuckerberg, and Friendster is looking to sell for far less than their investors would hope for.

Twitter started as a side project. The original idea was completely based around sending status updates from your mobile phone. A few years later, that basic idea is still very much a part of Twitter, but it's turned into so much more. It's a new form of communication and it's changing the world as we know it.

The funny thing is, it took Twitter years to even understand what their idea REALLY was. Go look at the new homepage. It's all about real time search. What's happening right now? That's what Twitter is. Well, until three weeks ago, you could go to the homepage and the about page and any other page on the site and have no idea why Twitter was actually useful. The founders didn't even know. It took a lot of money, a ton of hard work and a lot of smart minds to wrap their heads around what the idea actually was and then figure out how they could present it to the world.

The point is, entrepreneurship is not about a big idea. It's about execution and it's about a whole boat load of little ideas that come from assembling a smart team of people and giving them the freedom to innovate.

That's why I loved reading about the new initiative by YCombinator. They will be issuing RFS's or Requests for Startups. Basically they give some ideas of what kind of company they are looking for and they will accept the entrepreneurs that pitch the best way to get the idea done. Obviously the people at YCombinator understand that startups need an idea, but the successful ones are the startups that make ideas come to life.

Over the past two years since starting Brazen Careerist I've realized this first hand. When Penelope and I first discussed starting a company, we had no idea what we were going to do. We knew the market we wanted go into, and we knew that we wanted to help people with their careers, but that's about it. No crazy ideas to change the world. Just a desire to do something great.

Since then, we've all had a lot of good ideas and a lot of bad ideas, and the whole team has worked their tails off to make this whole thing come to life. And finally after a couple of years, we have a pretty good idea of what our business is. All it took was not being able to pay rent occasionally, showering and living at the office some days, working when we were supposed to be sleeping, and cheering our one-man development team as he coded until 6 am.

All that stuff is called execution. And that's what running a business is all about. Every startup that's lived on for more than a couple months has done the same thing, and every successful start-up will continue to do the same thing.

My point is this. If you're dying to be an entrepreneur because you're full of ideas, just pick one. Put a plan together, create some milestones, pitch in some capital, recruit a partner or two, hit your milestones and execute on the plan that you created. Be prepared for sacrifice, instability, arguments, being terrified, and a serious lack of sleep. Because that's what the game is really all about. Your idea is just the beginning.

No matter how hard I try, I cannot get in the habit of doing these things in a timely way. So recently I've been figuring out how to automate as many of these tasks as possible.

The trend towards automating your life and relying on services is nothing new for twenty-something's. Websites that save you the extra trip to the store, like Netflix are a staple among my friends. And most people I know are living in apartments or condos, where you don't have to worry about stuff like mowing the lawn, raking the leaves, or shoveling snow.

With the emergence of Web 2.0, there are a new whole host of services that let you automate your life. My recent automation to-do has been automating my finances. I put all of my information into Mint.com so I can see my entire financial picture at a glance. Then I read Ramit's book, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, and automated my bills as much as possible.

Now that my finances are taken care of, the next annoying task on my automation to-do list is to make sure I never have to run out to buy essentials again. Alice.com is launching in beta today, and if the site works out as advertised, my weekly trip to Walgreens will no longer be necessary.

Alice lets you set up reminders for when you need to reorder a product. At first you take a guess as to when you will next need a product. When the time comes, you get a reminder. But as you continue to use the site, Alice actually tracks how often you reorder each product and delivers automated reminders so you never have to run out to CVS at 6:30 in the morning because you threw your last razor out three days ago!

As busy as we all are between our careers, social lives, online networking, exercising etc. it's nice to have a handful of tools to automate the annoying tasks, and save us time and money. Alice definitely has the potential to become a welcome addition to my automation toolset.

The folks over at Alice were nice enough to offer a giveaway to the readers on Employee Evolution and Brazen Careerist. So I figured I would keep it simple. Leave a comment below listing one of the tools you use to automate your life or make your life easier. It can be anything from your Netflix subscription, products or services, your addiction to Mint, living in an apartment, or your monthly wine delivery. Get creative! We'll choose our 5 favorite comments and each will receive a $100 credit to use towards purchases on Alice.com. Good Luck!

(*Disclaimer, my girlfriend works at Alice, but the site is great regardless!)

Groups give our community the ability to create whatever content they want to see on the site. For a small site, we have a lot of user engagement and we can't express how much we appreciate that. But like any true startup, we're never satisfied. So the team came to a decision that it was time to put more control in the hands of our community, and groups was the best way to do this.

Groups have three main features. The first is chatter. Chatter is quick thoughts, ideas, relevant links, questions etc. Borrowing from Twitter, we decided to make chatter short and sweet, so 140 characters are all you get.

The next feature is events. Group members can create an event, including time and place, and an address with a Google map so attendees don't get lost on their way. We anticipate that people in the location based groups will use this feature to organize tweet-ups, Brazen meet-ups and any other networking functions. But it's also just as easy to organize online events or promote your webinars and other events.

Finally, we developed forums to let group members really dive into a discussion about a particular topic. Members can create a forum topic that they would like to get feedback on, and the rest of the group can leave comments and ideas without the restriction of 140 characters.

As we work towards becoming a full scale social network for young professionals, we will be introducing new features on a regular basis. All of the features will come from the crazy ideas that we throw around in the office and the feedback we get from you all. So if you want to have some say in what comes next, let us know what you think. You can even join the Brazen Feedback Group and start a discussion on what you think we should do.

As always, we asked some of our most active members to beta test the product, so there are already more than 35 groups. My personal favorites right now are; Fit Freaks, Madtown Crew, Bookshelf and Drupal.

Definitely go browse through groups, join the ones that interest you, create your own groups, and don't forget to participate!