I think it would be worth the while of the Center of Effective Altruism and forum administrators to build a section, accessible through the sidebar or potentially somewhere even more attention-grabbing, wherein forum users can upload a career profile, including a section for current aspirations, a reflection on one's current job/etc, and of course a link to or embedded resume.
Other users could browse profiles, responding to questions posed on the profile or making recommendations based on the individual's goals and experience.
The exposure of forum users to the profiles could be done in many ways, but I think a grid of image + crucial info boxes, one for each profile, sortable and rankable according to different categories or metrics, would be especially easy to navigate, enabling users browsing the profiles to find those they are especially well-equipped to advise or might want to partner with/alert to an opportunity. Obviously, DMs would be easy to access from each profile, but I think that a public forum-style discussion underneath each profile could also be valuable, to allow others to respond to advice given.
80k has 1-on-1s, but this doesn't necessarily achieve the same community-building, access to highly specific or eccentric advice, or ease of perusal by other people (even lurkers) which all might give this feature a unique niche to fill. Plus, there will always be people more comfortable with the forum than 80k 1-on-1s for whatever reason. This could be an outreach tool, too.
Survey here about whether this is a good idea.
Addressing possible concerns:
This feature might have its most obvious application for those early on in their careers, and I think that use case might already justify the tool, but I think it is also very possible for someone to find a new employee or research partner later on in their career this way. Yes, it is kind of just reinventing LinkedIn, but this is doing it the EA way, where you can immediately navigate to the user's posts, and sort on and see data on each profile tailored to EA-relevant info, which seems potentially valuable. Even just taking stock of EA talent in this way could get people's gears turning on how best to harness it. You could even have surveys in profiles (“do you think I should do X or Y” if you just want to get a quick temperature check on people’s opinions).
Plus, if people try to get on the EA forum just for access to this feature (and attendant job advice or opportunities) they'll have to learn a good bit about EA to reach the point of finishing their profile, and they'll only ever be hired if they're actually a good fit. This seems win-win. Obviously, it's possible you could reach the point of dilution where it's not worth going on that part of the forum, but this just seems unlikely to me. Plus, you could always add filters (“has been an EA forum member for two months and gotten at least 10 karma”) to basically erase this problem.
