Is blogging your new resume?
In an interesting article on Tech Central, one writer suggests that your blog may be required reading for any editors who want to hire you. Read more about it at Common Sense Journalism.
As the writer put it:
This, of course, is part of the idea behind this J-School Year project.
What do you think, especially since so many blogs are so personal and so woefully unedited? Are you leaving a permanent record that could hurt you down the road?
Update: A thoughtful response from Martin Stabe in the UK.
As the writer put it:
If you were an editor looking for a new hire these days, what would your first move be after checking your candidate's resume and clips?
To check their blog, of course.
This, of course, is part of the idea behind this J-School Year project.
What do you think, especially since so many blogs are so personal and so woefully unedited? Are you leaving a permanent record that could hurt you down the road?
Update: A thoughtful response from Martin Stabe in the UK.
posted by Doug at 4:24 PM
4 Comments:
hurt me? most entries in blogs are written when you're feeling some sort of emotion that enables you to write the way you cannot write at any other time. if there is any true account of how you can write then blogs are it. it's not about the way they are written, it's about the passion for writing that they portray. and since i think interviews make people not act like their true selves anyway, what better way to find out who they really are than their blogs? however, it is 'personal' stuff, but if you're going to be a writer then everything could be considered personal because you're putting something that you thought up out there and that's always scary to some degree.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
True, but ...
Part of the hiring dance, sad to say, is not revealing all of yourself. Everyone has parts an employer isn't going to like. (And consider all the hue and cry about psychological testing and checking credit reports as part of the hiring process.) So while I agree with you that emotion produces some of the best writing, it's often emotion channeled by a specific time and purpose, not "letting it all hang out" as can happen on personal blogs.
And what about so many entries with misspellings, wrong usage, etc. If editors toss resumes with a typo (yes, just one ... I know of at least one case where a student lost an internship because of one misspelling and others where polite but stern warning e-mails were generated), then what about blogs filled with them?
Fodder for debate.
What of the butchered grammar that shows up in printed clips? I know of one entertainment editor who couldn't spell his way out of a paper bag when he began (the product of a fine chicago public school education), but he had good editors to clean up his prose while he studied dictionary.
What will hiring pros make of blog posts? Hard to say. The real "danger" in using blog posts as a hiring data point is the possibility that such posts could be used to weed out people with "undesirable" opinions. Suppose, for instance, that a young student were to express less-than-adequate support for liberal or conservative political viewpoints. Would a hiring editor toss the resume because the editor didn't agree with the (possibly) naive postings of a 21-year-old j-school student?
Would a student be subject to a sort of "Easterbrook effect"* where everything he ever said were fodder for letter writers should he cover a controversial local topic? Would a hiring editor think that such a writer was not worth the hassle? Mores the pity.
* Named for Gregg Easterbrook, the ESPN.com writer who was fired after he wrote a review of a Quentin Tarantino movie that included a remark that was judged anti-semitic.
Bryan Murley
www.webmurley.net/blog/
Post a Comment
<< Home