SPOILER ALERT: Anna Karenina Plot Points Revealed In This Post!

I was getting ready for work this morning and saw the bit of the end of a segment on "Good Morning America." The segment was apparently designed to show people how to "Tweet" their way into a new job, and there was the kind of earnest-looking woman who generally populates those kind of stories -- some HR person or other who figured out that "Tweeting" and "Jobs" are the "peanut butter" and "chocolate" of the news industry right now, so she simply made up a story and went with it, the story being that you can "Tweet" your way to a job.

Now, I think "Twitter" is stupid, and I'm dismayed at the love people have for shorter and shorter text-based entertainment. If "Anna Karenina" were written today, publishers would demand it be "flash fiction" and limited to this:

All unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. Anna Karenina's family's own way of being unhappy was shown by her love for that other guy. Then they got unhappier in a different way when she threw herself in front of a train. And Russia is scenic.

Which, now that I look at it, is not bad. Not bad at all. Better that than the original.

I'm getting sidetracked, here. Twitter may be around to stay... but you cannot Tweet your way to a job. That's not how it works. Employers are not sitting around trying to find employees who are capable of typing with their thumbs to generate "spontaneous" "thoughts" like Mmm. Potato chips. Yum. (<<That Tweet Courtesy of Ashton Kutcher. Are we over with him yet?)

What employers want -- and take it from me, because I periodically help hire people -- is to know what you can do and how you can do it and that you are the right person for the job. That's hard to express in 140 characters or less.

It is easy to express, though, in an online resume, such as the type you can set up at VisualCV -- a site that'll let you sign up (For FREE!) and post your resume online -- an online resume that can include charts, work samples, audio, video and images. You can then email it to people, or give them the URL (it can even feature your own URL with your own name in it.)

Plus -- and this is a bonus if you're SECRETLY searching for a new job -- you can control who sees it.

So let's compare these two methods:

Job Seeker A: [tweets] need job. Have mucho skills. wife bugging me. Lost pants today.

Job Seeker B: Dear Employer, I am interested in that multimillion dollar position with your global company; specifically, the one that requires only three hours of work per week but includes as a benefit full-body massages by B-movie starlets. Here is a link to my OnlineCV: http://www.visualcv.com/jobseekerb. You'll see, when you go there, full-text samples of the last two reports I wrote for my current company, along with a graph demonstrating just how much money I earned them. Note in the accompanying picture that I am fully clothed in attractive business attire?

Job Seeker A: [tweets] Missed nother job. Have time now to read Anna K.