Welcome to the New Brazen Careerist

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Another great resource full of helpful career information. I’ve added the “Brazen Careerist” to my blogroll, you might want to do the same!

Welcome to the new Brazen Careerist: user-generated profiles, color photos, and networking capabilities. It’s been a long time coming. There were plenty of conversations–arguments–behind the scenes, along the way to this point. So in case you were curious about what went down inside the minds and offices of team Brazen, here’s a sneak peak.

Why Profiles?
The obvious answer is because it was about time to get with it. If you want to compete in the web 2.0 sphere, you need user generated profiles and networking capabilities between community members. But, less obvious, was that as great as our community has become, we’ve always had the feeling that something was missing. To nobody’s surprise, we decided that a blue and white picture with a bio that’s controlled by some mysterious person in the Brazen Careerist office is simply not good enough.
Here’s how we do things: we get some feedback and roll out what we think people will like. We get more feedback. We adjust accordingly. That’s what we did with our terribly ugly first site design, and that’s what we did with profiles, and I’m glad we did.

How’d We Choose the Categories?
When user generated profiles were only an idea, we really didn’t know what categories to include with them. We knew that keeping it simple was good. So we had to look at what Brazen Careerist really stands for. We realized that Brazen is a place for young professionals to create or promote an online brand that is both personal and professional. Keeping work and life completely separate is an old paradigm, so a web 2.0 career site should have personal interests and goals, and professional specialties and goals.

Of course, because Brazen is about a building and promoting your online brand, and because other social networks are a major part of people’s lives, we included links to Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter. We also left an optional place for a resume (we can debate how “old school” resumes are at another time). The final criteria was that the categories needed to be common and easy for users to think of.

The “Old Person” Issue
The most controversial decision we had to make was, “Do we let people over 30 into the network?” As recently as last Thursday when we did our private beta launch to the community, you still had to be less than 30 years old to join.

Brazen has become synonymous with Generation Y, and we love that. The working world recognizes that people in their twenties are often the hardest to reach and the pickiest demographic. They also know that people in their twenties define cool. We’re the trendsetters. So it’s important that our community be centered in that hard-to-reach demographic.

However, Generation Y is not a group of people with an “us versus them” mentality. We’re group oriented, we’re inclusive, and we’ll take advice anywhere we can get it. Secondly, telling our already-engaged readers that they can’t be part of a community because they are too old goes against what social networking and web 2.0 stands for–collaboration and conversation.

So, we compromised. Anyone can create a profile, read blog posts, comment, and fan people. But because we’re a community designed to help young professionals establish an online brand, Brazen bloggers must be 18 to 30.

What’s Next?
There are a million different directions we can go. Now that profiles are launched, Brazen is playing ball on a whole different level. And Team Brazen has a ton of ideas that are just waiting to be put into action. Profiles will be improved, the company section is due for a major facelift, and there will be new options for participating in the conversation. Whatever we do next, we want to be sure that we both improve your experience as a community member and get us closer to our ultimate business goals. So please, provide feedback, tell us we’re great, tell us we suck. Whatever it is, just tell us!

We hope you enjoy the new Brazen Careerist! We’re all looking forward to what comes next.

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Tags: Career