Contra - Next Gen Professional Identity 🔮



Contra is the Independent-first community and hiring platform shaping the future of work focused on the creative cluster.

Do you like traditional CV's?

Years of experience squeezed into a few lines of text. How much does it really tell about you as a professional? Especially when we talk about the creative workforce.

These were some of the first questions we bugged ourselves with at Contra:

• How do independents prefer to present their work? (e.g. engineers, designers, marketers, etc.)
• What do clients want to see on the independent's profile to hire them?
• What should the perfect profile page look like?

The traditional "CV-based" approach to hiring considers two main factors:

• Years of relevant experience
• Companies where the candidate worked before

This format doesn't tell much when we talk about independent professionals

Don't get me wrong, experience is essential for successful hiring, but years of work and fancy titles are not the best info for finding a potential candidate.

You've probably seen people who may be considered "junior" based on the amount of time they worked in a given position but are way more robust than their colleagues with decades of experience.

"It's not about how long you do something that matters, but rather what you do, how good you do it, and who surrounds you."

The old way of presenting work is simply not enough anymore 🙅‍♂️

Ok then, what is the perfect professional identity in this case?

We've conducted multiple qualitative and quantitative reasearches and considered multiple approaches. From constructing a more rigid profile focused on the visual to super flexible "builders". I can outline a few key points we've learned about what should the future online professional identity look like:

• Personality - more about who you are and why you are unique.
• Flexibility - you can shape your experience differently, you may want to write a case study, or you may like to feature some awards, or share some professional insights.
• Collaboration - people you've worked with are your best references. This is crucial, but it's being entirely ignored in a regular CV.
• Consolidation - it's uncomfortable when you have to read about the experience in one place, then go to a second place to see the portfolio, and go to the third place to check out the recommendations / reviews.
• Selling - your professional identity should prompt the client to reach out to you right away.

🕵️‍♂️ When thinking through Contra's professional identity concept, we investigated the professional profiles on dozens of platforms. We have come up with an interesting solution covering all the fundamentals I mentioned above.

Erin's beautiful profile

Expanded project example

Productized service

Iterating through the build -> measure -> learn loops we've come to this simple and beautiful design. There is a massive backlog of improvements to come, but you can already see the direction of the future professional identity here. Go ahead and explore the platform to see more 🙌