An online resume is a crucial part of your personal brand because it helps you directly connect your experience to the niche you’re interested in. While About.me and Flavors.me provide a basic overview of your skills and interests, an online resume service should also let you display samples of your work as a proof of your expertise. You’ve already had a chance to try out one of those services back when I wrote about enthuse.me, and today we’ll see what Zerply and Resume.io bring to the table.

When I created a Zerply account a long, long time ago, it was advertised as a generic online resume service. Now it’s advertised as “a network for the world’s top creative talent in TV, film, and games ” – obviously, a shift regarding the target audience occurred in the meantime. Of course, you can create a Zerply account even if you’re not in the aforementioned professions, but Zerply is by design focused on the audiovisual fields of work.

Zerply functions as you would expect it to. Creating a profile page is simple and straightforward, and once it’s finished, it looks and behaves like a really polished, elegant resume. You can edit your profile URL, write a short bio, craft a catchy tagline and list your experience and education chronologically.

Your Zerply profile also lets you enter your skills and add tags that represent you well. However, you can’t have more than 5 tags, so choose wisely (or go back to Settings and change them later).

To make things easier, Zerply can import data from your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. If you’ve set up your LinkedIn profile as a resume and you’re satisfied with it, you can just copy it over to Zerply. Other services that you can plug in to complete your resume are 500px, Behance, SmugMug and Flickr. From your profile settings, you can add links to any website and connect your social media accounts by simply clicking on their icons.

As for the appearance of your Zerply resume, you can choose one of five free themes or buy the premium ones. You will have to upgrade to a paid account if you want a custom domain.

Zerply lets you connect with other users, so you can follow them, make endorsements and leave comments on their profile pages. The Activity tab on your profile page shows all the changes you made as well as comments and events you receive from other people.

The Work section is the most important here, since that’s where you’ll exhibit concrete evidence of your awesome skills. In other words, here you can add samples of your work to your profile. Zerply lets you upload images from your computer and import files from your Vimeo, Youtube, Github and SoundCloud profiles. These samples can be shared on your social media profiles directly from Zerply.

Last but not least, Zerply offers a browser extension to Chrome users. With the help of this practical addon you can quickly submit your work to Zerply and receive realtime notifications from your profile. This is nice, but it would be much nicer if it was available for other browsers, or at least for Firefox.

Still, Zerply is a great choice if you want to draw attention to your work. Like About.me, it provides statistics about your profile for free, and the interface is smooth and responsive. If you’ve already shared your work on Behance, deviantART and every other popular site and now you’re looking for something fresh, give Zerply a chance – I think you won’t be disappointed.

Resume.io

…and now for something completely different. In contrast to tons of options offered by About.me and Flavors.me, Resume.io greets you with an almost extremely minimal page. A simple login form on a grayish background with no alluring promises of cool features should be a clue enough to what kind of service this is. After all, they do call themselves “crazy simple resumes”.

Resume.io is quick, easy and free; choose a username and create an account. Once you’ve done that, you can start building your resumes – yes, plural, because Resume.io allows you to create more than just one version of a resume. You can keep multiple copies of a resume and tailor them according to your needs. You can also alter your username if you change your mind about it, but remember that this will affect your Resume.io profile URL (it looks like this: resume.io/username).

The feature that probably makes this service stand out from the rest is tracking. On Resume.io, you can set up tracking for each of your resumes to monitor the frequency and quantity of visits (views) they receive. This type of evaluation is useful for your personal marketing skills because you can draw conclusions about the quality of your resumes based on the views they get.

True, Resume.io might not be the best place to show off your creativity, because you cannot customize the appearance of your resume. You can’t upload samples of your work either. Moreover, Resume.io is not exactly a well-known service that everyone’s talking about. It doesn’t seem very popular and the only comments I found about it were negative criticism – “too simple, not enticing, not enough information about the service”. Perhaps “crazy simple” is a bit too crazy for some people.

Not for me, though. I registered at Resume.io and I encourage you to do the same, because it’s a great way to increase your online visibility, and it’s incredibly simple to use. You get a free vanity URL and a clean space to list the most important information about yourself. Resumes shouldn’t be too flashy anyway; simplicity is sometimes the best choice. Besides, it’s not the wild fonts and quirky illustrations that will land you the job – it is and it should be first and foremost about your competence.