Having been in the recruiting business for nearly 10 years, I've seen various recruiting strategies come and go - some good, while others, not so good. Now I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that blogging may just change the very way we look for job seekers. I've never seen a tool with such potential power for candidates seeking career advancement and for recruiters to not only find qualified candidates, but learn more about them before ever speaking to them. Furthermore, I've noticed some blogosphere posts and mainstream media stories about candidates who've pursued employment leads and landed jobs through their blogging savvy. For instance, the blog Secrets of the Job Hunt recently posted the story of Carolynn Duncan, a job seeker who used her blogging skills to land a job and garnered praise for her creativity from Paul Allen, the CEO who hired her. And if you haven't looked at the blogosphere as a place where you they can actively promote yourself, you may be missing the boat. Fellow recruiter Rob Merrill recently blogged about the benefits to sourcing and qualifying potential candidates. He feels that blogs and other summarization search engines like ZoomInfo.com have untapped potential and are a growing trend among recruiters. As recruiters have known for years, the key to finding and landing a job is marketability - pure and simple. You have to get noticed before you can get hired. And few would question the power of the blogosphere in marketing oneself to potential employers, networking sources (such as recruiters - hint, hint) or friends/acquaintances with any employment leads. Spherion has seen a lot of job search and recruitment trends come and go over the past 60 years, but I assure you, blogging has staying power. This may be the first time we've talked about the "blogcruiting" trend, but it certainly won't be the last. Stay tuned -- this conversation has just begun.
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I'm really enjoying Spherion's new blog and Don Boone's post about blogging caught my eye because he's writing about the same thing I've been thinking about for a while - the different ways in which technology is changing recruitment, and... [Read More]
Tracked on August 16, 2006 12:56 PM
Comments
Interesting term "blog-cruiting." The thing you didn't mention, which is really important, is a personal blog can also get you in trouble during the hiring process. I recently interviewed an entry-level candidate that I really liked...until I Facebooked him and found his blog that was inappropriate to say the least. Before you apply for a job, make sure your online fingerprint is either erased or at the very least not trace-able back to you!
Posted by MK6554 on August 10, 2006 6:30 PM
It's a valid point you bring up. I think we could write a whole post on this point. As a matter of fact, recent research by http://www.ExecutiveCareerSuite.com found approximately 75% of hiring managers and recruiters conduct a Google search on applicants before interviewing them, and there are a host of examples of people who lost their job or their chances of being hired for what they wrote in a blog.
On the point about erasing the fingerprints, I'm certainly not a technical expert but it is my understanding that all public web pages leave a permanent record somewhere. There is a site called Internet Archive: Wayback Machine http://www.archive.org/web/web.php that allows anyone to search dated archives of web pages going back to 1995. I think the more sound advice is to simply avoid publishing potentially damaging or inappropriate content in the first place. Particularly if you are an active job seeker, you should assume that potential employers will research you and your credentials in a number of ways, and that includes the blogosphere. If you think a statement will negatively impact your ability to land a job, just don't write it.
Posted by Don Boone on August 11, 2006 2:14 PM
MK and Dan:
I think a key distinction needs to be made here. People are typically not fired for "blogging" but for including in appropriate content in their blogs. In the same way, if I trashed my boss in a conversation, I wouldn't be fired for "speaking." Rather, I'd be fired for my inappropriate comments.
Blogging is just the tool that delivers the content, and it can be a very powerful one for marketing yourself and developing a personal brand.
I recently landed a job as a content producer at Monster.com, and what put me over the top was the work I had done with my Bryper.com blog and New Comm Road podcast. This helped demonstrate that I could talk and write intelligently about the new-media space, and these were skills that the company was looking for.
As a blogger, I'm very conscious about anything that I write in a blog, because there will always be a record of it somewhere. If there's something you don't think a potential employer might want to read about you someday--even five or ten years down the road--then don't blog about it; don't put it in your MySpace or Facebook profile; don't put it in a message board. Employers should spend time researching your digital record; it's a no-brainer.
But by no means should this mean that you shouldn't blog. You just have to blog intelligently and strategically!
--Bryan Person
Blog: Bryper.com
Podcast: NewCommRoad.com
Posted by Bryan Person on August 23, 2006 11:12 AM