Robert Scoble, a famous tech personality in Silicon Valley, is hiring an assistant. In a post expressing his frustrations with the résumés he’s received so far, he lets the candidates know the best way to stand out: blog. Sure Scoble’s hiring for a “tech” position, but I am confident that blogging is going to play an increasingly prominent role as a qualification for all sorts of opportunities. Unfortunately, this aspect of the Web’s impact is not getting as prominent a place as the warnings against expsoing too much about yourself on Facebook. This tone damages the conversation, overemphasizing the paranoia and neglecting (if not rejecting) the positive possibilities. I want to change that tone, and that’s what this post is all about.
Scare Tactics
Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of commotion about how companies, and even universities nowadays, are investigating the digital “breadcrumbs” left across the Internet by candidates for employment/admission. Whether doing a simple Google search to see what appears in the top few results, or using dedicated tools to “check between the sofa cushions”, if you will: those whom we seek to impress are taking more and more seriously our online behavior. (On an interesting side note, Spokeo — which I covered in one of my first posts on this blog — has begun advertising itself as a tool for HR professionals to do “deep social search” on job candidates).
I’ll never forget the story my friend Henry told me of his first day at the White House as an intern last year. As they walked into one of their orientations, there was a projector and screen set up showing slideshow. The images being projected were drawn from the public albums of the new interns’ Facebook profiles; you can imagine that a good number of those pictures were, well… not flattering. When the nervous interns were settled uncomfortably in their seats, they had a nice little talking-to about how they were the face of the White House, how all these images could be accessed and republished by anyone, etc. Luckily for Henry, he had previously (and famously) sanitized his profile to include only the following message: “I’d rather talk to you in person.”
“Be careful what you leave behind,” the experts and mainstream media tell us. This is certainly fair advice. What they fail to point out are the many positive ways in which we can embrace the idea of the “perpetual digital dossier”, and harness it to really take ourselves places.
Continue reading ‘Blogging Your Passions (or, How I Got Into Google)’
