Blogs bad for job seekers?
A writer in the Chronicle of Higher Education says blogs are bad for job seekers. Well, depends. I myself would look more favorably on a candidate who used blogging to widen his/her circle of professional contacts. Blogs are one way to encourage people to keep up with fresh ideas. Ideally, moreover, they’ll have comment areas–so peer-review can happen instantly.
Oh, and blogs can work great for employers. The Teleblog was one reason someone signed up for a library project in which I’m involved–it showed I knew my stuff. I may take a breather from the TeleBlog in the near future or slow down the pace to focus on the needs of an important client, an ISP, but I’m entirely sold on the benefits of the medium.
Meanwhile here are more details from Bloggers Need Not Apply in the Chronicle (found via Robert Nagle)
What is it with job seekers who also write blogs? Our recent faculty search at Quaint Old College resulted in a number of bloggers among our semifinalists. Those candidates looked good enough on paper to merit a phone interview, after which they were still being seriously considered for an on-campus interview.
That’s when the committee took a look at their online activity.
In some cases, a Google search of the candidate’s name turned up his or her blog. Other candidates told us about their Web site, even making sure we had the URL so we wouldn’t fail to find it. In one case, a candidate had mentioned it in the cover letter. We felt compelled to follow up in each of those instances, and it turned out to be every bit as eye-opening as a train wreck.
Don’t get me wrong: Our initial thoughts about blogs were, if anything, positive. It was easy to imagine creative academics carrying their scholarly activity outside the classroom and the narrow audience of print publications into a new venue, one more widely available to the public and a tech-savvy student audience.
We wanted to hire somebody in our stack of finalists, so we gave the same — or more — benefit of the doubt to the bloggers as to the others in the pool.
A candidate’s blog is more accessible to the search committee than most forms of scholarly output. It can be hard to lay your hands on an obscure journal or book chapter, but the applicant’s blog comes up on any computer. Several members of our search committee found the sheer volume of blog entries daunting enough to quit after reading a few. Others persisted into what turned out, in some cases, to be the dank, dark depths of the blogger’s tormented soul; in other cases, the far limits of techno-geekdom; and in one case, a cat better off left in the bag.
The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one’s unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It’s not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it’s also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses.
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