Author Archives: KatHansen

Editor’s note: This article is the first of two parts. Part II provides tips and examples for using a blog as a resume.

Through the use of a variety of online tools — blogs, wikis, social-networking sites, portfolios, podcasts, Youtube videos, and more — individuals, especially younger people, are socially constructing their identities in ways unimagined a dozen or so years ago.

Where a dedicated careerist of old constructed a job-seeking identity through a resume and a few other printed materials disseminated to audiences that seem puny by today’s standards, postmillennial upwardly mobile types are establishing their career identities to vast global audiences using the tools of the so-called Web 2.0, defined in part by Web guru Tim O’Reilly as comprising an “architecture of participation.” The concept of Web 2.0 “suggests that everyone … can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves,” writes Andrew Keen in The Daily Standard.

And recruiters are responding. Case in point is the notion of the blog as a replacement or accompaniment for a resume. Sarah E. Needleman reported on the Career Journal site that Ryan Loken, a Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., recruitment manager, had filled an estimated 125 corporate jobs by reading blogs. Well-known recruiting blogger Heather Hamilton, a staffing manager at Microsoft, noted in her blog that “recruiters are searching blogs specifically for resumes.” Recruiters who responded to blog postings on the topic of blogs as replacements for resumes made such comments as:

“We’ve hired two people fresh out of college in the past four months that we found through their blogs — one didn’t even have a formal resume. Frankly, he didn’t need one. A blog trumps a resume every single time.”

“Our stance is that blogging is important — at least in our medium — and we are developing a strategy around it. We are conducting a search for a Marketing Director right now — if an applicant doesn’t blog, or at least contribute heavily, it’s fair to say that we are going to pass them by.”

The concept of the blog as resume has been the subject of several articles in 2006 and 2007, most of them, appropriately, blog postings with numerous follow-up comments by blog readers and posters. Dave Lefkow’s 2006 entry on ERE.net (a site for executive recruiters) entitled My Blog is My Resume (registration may be required to see the full article), talks about “the changing dynamics of the Web’s second generation.” His article’s implications for job-seekers are apparent in these excerpts:

Privacy is no longer an issue. This generation seems quite comfortable
publishing all of the gory details of their lives online. Some of these details will shock you. Get used to workers who are perfectly functioning members of the work world, but who perhaps make decisions in their personal lives that you find appalling.

Many job seekers, growing up in the level playing field that is the innovation economy, will often expect to be judged by their ideas, not their experience. Resumes will become irrelevant (or at best, a meaningless formality that describes your work history, not who you are).

Why are some employers and recruiters coming to see tools like blogs as more revealing and authentic than resumes? One blog commenter explains: “Think about it — a resume is one or two pages, of flat, static information. A blog is an interactive space where you can
really see inside of a prospect’s head — their ability to innovate, think, and communicate. You not only find out what they’ve done for work, but what their passions are, and frankly if they’re the type of person you think would fit into your organization.”

Another commenter noted that the new generation craves personal contact. A blog provides a way to move beyond a resume’s “one to two pages of flat, static information” and create a sense of personal contact. When you reader a blogger’s work, you often have a sense of
knowing him or her even though you’ve never met.

Lefkow’s blog entry and indeed the entire discussion of the idea of blogs as replacements for resumes seems to have originated with an entry on Scobleizer, the blog of Robert Scoble, who noted that he hadn’t needed a resume to get his most recent job and implied that he didn’t expect to need one in the future. Scoble also asserted that his Wikipedia
entry takes the place of a resume. This brief posting elicited 59 comments. Similarly, Adam Darowski in his blog, Traces of Inspiration, submitted an entry entitled The Blog is the New Resume, and Joshua Porter followed with an identically titled posting on his blog, Bokardo, both of which generated extensive comments that provide glimpses into a future in which blogs — or other tools — might take the place of resumes ­– or not.

Darowski wrote, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have more than a vague bulleted list of accomplishments before actually picking up the phone to call the person? There is. There’s blogging. Blogging is the perfect way for a candidate to give an employer a more detailed sales pitch — to show they can ‘talk the talk’ (as opposed to just fill a resume with buzzwords).”

Porter added a five-point list of the advantages blogs have over resumes, including a blog’s ability to represent the individual, its archival quality, and the blogger’s editorial control over it. One of his commenters noted that the editorial control enables the blogger to
go back into archived entries and update or revise them. Continue reading →