Looking for work is usually a frustrating, arduous process. Sending resumes, filling out applications, making phone calls, hitting up your business contacts and sometimes getting no reply or any indication that you’re making progress can make anyone feel downtrodden. And that’s just how things usually are. Even more so now, people are getting reduced to a stack of resumes and over qualified individuals are forced to settle for jobs that are beneath them. In the last few years, the job hunt has been even more difficult as work is scarce and people are scared about their future.
For technology professionals, there’s help. Gild, recently launched in September, takes the natural competitive aspect of online job hunting and utilizes it for your advantage. Gild offers corporate-sponsored contests that test you with questions in your field, whether you’re a physicist, Javascript expert or just an armchair technology historian. Succeeding at these short tests makes you eligible to win prizes like an iPod Touch, Kindle or a Canon Powershot digital camera, to name a few.
You can also join teams for competition with up to 6 people and compare scores on leaderboards individually and collectively (there’s even an international country based leaderboard, something they may have learned from the Orkut example in Game Based Marketing).
Add skills to your resume profile and Gild will show you where you stand in relation to other users in experience. You can also take certification tests on the site that not only earn you badges of increasing rank, but also display on your profile so employers can easily validate your level of expertise and qualifications for positions. In many ways, this is like the Odesk test system writ public – a valuable service and good example of meaningful badging (if people believe in Gild’s rating system).
Gild makes it easier for you to find jobs, be discovered, prove your worth and actually feel validated in the process. The word “gild“, of course meaning to be coated in gold is an extremely appropriate and charming name for this site. It awards you for your hard work in a time when you might otherwise be ignored. It reminds you that you’re smart and worth some attention. And I’m sure the homonymic relation to the word “guild” is no accident. Gild brings technology professionals together through gaming to remind them that they’re not alone in this working world, even though it may often feel that way.
