Emurse is a recently launched service which has me pretty excited that allows users to easily create and maintain a professional and hosted resume. The founders, Gavin Hall and Alexander Rudloff of postGorilla (also lead developers for the new Netscape.com), says Emurse’s goal is to help users improve their future job hunts, but I feel it accomplishes much more then that. It’s an all around resume solution which everyone has a need for whether looking for a job or not. In my experience, creating a resume, keeping it up to date, sending it out to people, and trying to not lose it has been quite a task and rarely results in a fun time. With Emurse, all of this came easy and I actually had a fun time working on it.

Emurse offers a free service where anyone can signup and create a resume using their online resume builder and share it on the web. Users have the option to create or upload multiple resumes and obtain a permanent address for each (resume.emurse.com) where they can send people to view, download, and print their resume. Resume pages allow viewers to download in six different formats (DOC, PDF, RTF, ODT, HTML, TXT) and and at the same time track the amount of views, downloads, and prints of the resume for the owner to monitor.

When first logging in Emurse, you will be presented with an overview page. This page lists all of your existing resumes, recent statistics in a nice bar graph showing views and downloads, and even an area on the right that lists jobs you may be interested in, powered by Indeed, for those of you on a job hunt. First, I love being able to login and instantly see the statistics for my resumes - something you don’t see to often in services with resume builders. Secondly, I want to continue on the job results. Emurse uses a unique method that reads your existing resumes and extracts your skills from each to find jobs that are most relevant to your experience. It’s a neat feature, one I’m sure will be very helpful for anyone on the search, although I’d like to be able to view more results instead of only the two being listed. Also, if results don’t appear to be all that relevant, Emurse also allows you to go into you account settings and add keywords for more accurate searching.

You have two options when it comes to creating your hosted resume. The first is to create one from scratch using Emurse’s resume builer. The second is to simply upload any existing resume that you have that is either a Word Document, Rich Text Document, or OpenDocument file. Creating from scratch I feel is the best option and will open much more functionality to your shared address. Uploading a resume will simply store it on Emurse and allow you to send it to people and allow viewers to download it (not view) online in any of the six formats. Give both a try and see what you like using best. Let’s assume you are going with the resume builder:

The Emurse resume builder is great and possibly the best I’ve seen yet. It’s also very responsive being it is all dynamic using Ajax to allow you to easily add, sort, and modify information in your resume, saving each time you make a change automatically so you don’t loose anything. To get going, you start by adding sections of your resume. I started off by adding the Personal Information section which contains details usually listed at the top of any basic resume (although one field I felt should be added that doesn’t exist already is personal website), then my Objective. You can add more as you go as well as removeing and sorting them where you please.

One feature you will notice as you select a field in the editor, for instance, “Full Name,” you will see a tooltip appear. This tooltip is what Emurse calls, “Expert Tips,” which gives you hints on what to write in the field (IE: “Full Name” states, “Use your full name. No nicknames, Scooter”). The Expert Tips when displayed are very helpful and some quite funny - nice to see a sense of humor. I personally feel they can be a bit more descriptive on some and think it would be helpful of them to create a resource section on the site with an overview of tips and sites so anyone can make a resume without even having previous experience in making them.

Once you’ve got some sections and information added to your resume, skip over to the Display section (link right under Edit tab). Being that you supplied Emurse with your resume details in the appropriate fields, Emurse can take your information and easily display it in preset resume layouts looking nice and organized. You currently have the choice between five layouts: Professional, Classic, Modern, Edge, and Elegant (Professional or Elegant are my top picks). Simply select one of the designs and Emurse will set your resume to appear that way when viewed online or downloaded. All five layouts are very well made and look excellent and I read more are to come when Emurse steps it up by created “plus” accounts with more templates and functionality.

Once you’ve picked out a design, head over to the Share tab and grab your own address for your resume. Here is my Emurse resume (note, my resume is still in the works). You may also password protect your page if you wish. Once people start viewing your resume, statistics will appear and you can see the last 10 individual referrals to your resume and total views, downloads, and prints of your resume. Emurse also provides you with some HTML that you can stick in your sites to allow your visitors to easily download your resume without leaving your website.

The last feature I want to talk about is Emurse’s sending options. At first I didn’t think much of it, but once I sent a test out I saw how powerful it really is. The Send tab in Emurse allows users to send an email to any email address with the resume as an attachment (you can select file type as well) and track it from the point of sending it, recipient receiving it, scheduling an interview, and so on (as seen in drop down of screenshot). For each email you send you can save notes about how things are going with the contact as well as functionality to easily send a Thank You letter back to the contact to show your appreciation. It’s a whole organization and reminder tool built for tracking your sent out resumes and I am very impressed. But that’s not all. Soon, Emurse will allow you to actually send fax’s and postal your resume to people, although the founders have told me you will have to pay for this which is more then reasonable and I’d gladly pay for it.

Overall, I’m definitely loving Emurse. I know of many people that need such a service and I certain that it will help people get their resumes out there and hopefully get jobs coming in. I have multiple friends and family members that have asked for help on creating resumes and now I will gladly point them to Emurse as it is everything they will need. Easily create a resume, host it online for free, update it whenever you want, never forget where you resume is located, and send it to as many people as you wish. So far I have sent them a few recommendations including a spell checker, color adjustment for the top bar in public resume pages, and some field requests. At this time, only part of the functionality has been unveiled and I’m already very impressed and happy with the service. I’m excited to see what they’ve got coming. Once again, here’s my Emurse resume which I will be working on over the next couple days. Feel free to share your resumes if you happen to create one with Emurse.

View Emurse - Resumes Improved (Thanks for submitting, Bill F. - Emurse Resume)