In high school, I worked at a stereotypical California frozen yogurt shop. In the position, I fulfilled a number of tasks ranging from mopping the floors and maintaining the equipment to serving customers and resolving employee disputes. I loved that job and through hard work, was promoted to a shift lead before eventually leaving for college.

It wasn’t apparent to me at the time, but despite the importance of the skills attained at that job, the position would not persist on my digital resume for fear that it would obfuscate the other attributes which market me towards a specific field. In the 6 seconds[1] someone spends reading my resume, I wouldn’t want them to see Taylor Soft Serve Machine Maintainer instead of Scope definition for multiple FDA regulated products.

I don’t have the privilege to selectively provide those bullets to different individuals and professional content discovery platforms haven’t reached a level of maturity for me to present my master profile and allow effective skimming. In the digital world, our tools still only represent a single view of a multifaceted individual because we’ve been trained to believe that we have an omniscient view into someone’s identity.

What if I also wanted to be appealing as an engineer for the Taylor Company? Working with their machines as a customer would be a great addition to my resume…but that’s a sacrifice I have to make. Sorry recruiters.

In the conventional hiring process, this isn’t an issue. I would simply modify my resume to fit the position when applying based on the limited information on the requisition. In our research, this is an assumed process when applying for new positions.

For Copernicus, this is one of the issues we will be resolving. How can an individual maintain a professional network which has a scoped view into their professional experience which is dependent on the relationship? Maybe I want to maintain separate statistics and engineering profiles, selectively using them to network as a way to focus the experience. This solution also empowers recruiters and also enables a simplified application process through conventional processes.