Vizify Gives Recruiters Context for Your Digital Identity

Almost every interview that began with "So, tell me about yourself," then I might not need a job. Companies know they're not hiring a skill set; they're hiring a human. The interview used to be the first chance to see a candidate's true colors but now, looking at someone's digital footprint allows recruiters to sift through applicants even earlier. The blending of personal and professional lives isn't exactly new but the Internet does make it more easily accessible.

Job seekers are often reminded to be careful with privacy settings, to remove any photos that might put them in a negative light. But people looking for more digitally focused jobs are additionally encouraged to invest time into personal branding through blogs, Twitter or even Instagram.
Increasingly, it will not be enough to hide or mask a personal identity online, because the illusion of no digital footprint is itself seen as negative. So, in the sprit of "the best defense is a good offense," one startup created a way for you to wrap up the best of your resume and social media activity into a personalized site that's easy to provide to recruiters.

Vizify creates a paginated profile that visualizes data from social media accounts including Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter. Once you input all those sources, your profile will run about 11 pages — but you can edit everything and create new pages, each page focused on one content type: photo, factoid, quote, links and more. A page called "words" will aggregate the words you use a lot on Twitter along with visualizing the popularity of specific tweets. "Activities" uses Foursquare data to show places you frequently check in.
Co-founder and CEO Todd Silverstein says they interviewed more than 200 hiring managers, who say their biggest pain point is finding a cultural fit. Vizify's graphical bios aim to showcase achievements alongside interests and quirks.
The site, which came out of beta this week, also launched Vizcards, which are customizable bumper stickers and each can take up a page in your profile. It's a visual way to include things like a "bright idea" or your Myers-Briggs profile.

Vizify seems like a step above and beyond services About.me and Flavors.me, which both allowed users to choose a background image and aggregate all their social links onto one page. In Vizify you similarly log in through a variety of services, but it also surfaces your most popular posts and displays them in an interactive way.
While the site is easy to use, the customizations went much deeper than I expected. With a little time and effort, you can really make your page your own.
The profiles display well on mobile and are built for SEO, so it's likely your Vizify profile will begin appearing on the first page of results when someone Googles your name.
Vizify's long-term vision is to help you present yourself online in a way you want others to see you. Silverstein hopes users will adopt their Vizify pages as a primary home online that can be shared on a business card, resume or email signature.
"We believe the walls between your professional and personal identity are crumbling, if not already gone," Silverstein says. Vizify's profiles should help you put your best foot forward on both fronts.