How to find free resumes on Scribd (Part 1)

Posted by Jim Stroud

August 5, 2008

Have you guys heard of Scribd? (www.scribd.com)

In so many words, its like a YouTube for documents. on any given month, 17 million people research Scribd for documents of all types. Since Scribd launched in March 2007, it has become one of the top 300 websites on the Internet, receiving over 20 million monthly visitors. It has also accumulated over 17 billion words in its library, making it five times the size of Wikipedia!!! Wow. That is a lot.

I have been familiar with Scribd for some time because of other projects I am involved with, but it was not until recently that I realized, “Hey, I wonder if there are any resumes in their growing database?”

So, I decided to take a look and the short answer is… yes! There are resumes in Scribd, actually a bunch of them. Want to know how to dig them up? Okay, I’ll show you. (Smile)

The first way I want to show you is pretty easy. Say you have an interest in a Software Developer with a background in… umm… Java and C++. Well, all you have to do it type in a simple query:

resume java C++

The search results look interesting, especially the very first result.

What do you know. Its a resume ta-dah!

However, all of the results were not resumes. Let’s take a look at result #3. Its a PPT presentation of a Java Tutorial called “Introduction to Java.”

Clicking on the document, I notice a few things that interest me. First is the link to the User’s Scribd profile.

On this user’s profile is a link that I use to send them an email. (As shown by the arrow below.) To the right of that link is a list of technical documents that he has uploaded. Hmm… there sure are a lot of them. Looks like this person has a “thing” for Java. Cool. Now I would feel better about contacting them and asking if they were interested in the job I was trying to fill and/or if they knew someone who would be interested.

Scrolling down to the bottom of the Profile page I see that he is also a member of a group called “Java Technocrats.” So, I click that link and what do I find? Yup! more people with a passion for Java. Go figure.