Wednesday, April 11, 2007 9:21 AM
Corporate recruiters have long surfed the Web to vet potential hires, but now they are also surfing blogs to unearth job candidates, expanding their talent pool and gaining insights they say they can't get from résumés and interviews.
The above snippet, taken from an article entitled How Blogging Can Land You a Job in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, reaffirmed something that has been discussed in the blawgosphere at different times over the last few years. That is, your weblog can be an integral part of your living resume (or curriculum vitae if you prefer).
Ryan Loken, a Wal-Mart Stores Inc. recruitment manager, says he spends one to two hours a week searching through blogs for new talent or additional information about the candidates he has interviewed. "Blogs are a tool in the tool kit," he says. Since he joined the Bentonville, Ark., retail giant three years ago, Mr. Logen estimates that Web journals have helped him fill 125 corporate jobs. Most of the recruits were referred to him by bloggers and blog contributors, and some were the writers themselves.
In addition to blogs that focus on their industry or field of interest, recruiters say they check candidates' blogs about noncareer-related topics for evidence of writing skills and clues to how well rounded they are.
Granted (and the article says as much), to this point a lot of the hiring has been done in technical and media-oriented fields. However, this is to be expected. Traditional, professional verticals like legal have rarely been first adopters of anything. Legal more typically follows trends that other industries set and expand.
Initially, I think the community being developed by law librarians and researchers via their blawgs is ripe for both candidate finding and referrals. Legal technology and legal information provider companies are also entities that I think could greatly benefit from the blawgosphere in finding great potential hires for their growing businesses. Professional recruiters serving legal also could likely come up with a short list of potential candidates for many different jobs by connecting with people via the blawgosphere.
Blogs also help employers probe the qualifications of potential hires, says Wal-Mart's Mr. Loken. "If they have a blog or made a comment on one, you can see what their knowledge level truly is because résumés can be full of fluff."
Job seekers who blog increase the odds that a potential employer will find information online that the candidate wants to be seen, says Debbie Weil, a corporate blogging consultant in Washington and the author of "The Corporate Blogging Book," which was published last summer. "Everybody has an online identity whether they know it or not, and a blog is the single best way to control it," she says. "You're going to be Googled. No one hires anyone or buys anything these days without going online first and doing research."
For lawyers, a blawg can not only help them with their marketing and business growth plans, but in giving other law firms and corporations a running update as their experience and skill set. Even if you have no intention of ever leaving your current position or firm, you just never know who might call inquiring about your availability for a new job. As legal moves more and more to a free agent model, it certainly makes sense for lawyers to keep their options open. Let's face it, we all know partner level lawyers who left one place for another, simply because the new offer was too good to pass up.
Interestingly, the WSJ article also highlighted a company that saw the reward/risk of an employee who maintained a weblog. The reward was that via his weblog, the employee was networking and finding new candidates for his company. The risk was that the employee himself was receiving job offers from other companies.
Yet, to me, such risk always exists. Attempting to discourage the use of weblogs for networking would ultimately serve little purpose. If a company, university or law firm seeks to keep its best people, it should focus on becoming the employer of choice rather than react out of fear and try to somehow "hide" its employees. History has shown that the latter approach ultimately rarely works, and also tends to contribute to a weakening bottom line.
So, in thinking about your career path and goals, don't overlook the potential power of the blawgosphere. People in the technology and media fields have not, and it is obviously paying dividends.