In contrast to a previous entry, which discussed a column by “Ivan Tribble” in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Bloggers Need Not Apply,” Debbie Weil takes the complete opposite position in her article “Seven Tips for Blogging Your Way to a New Job,” in which she states: “If ever there were a perfect tool for the job hunter, blogging is it.”

(Since one has to get a membership in MarketingProfs.com to read the full Weil article, I’ll give a link to a major excerpt from it by another blogger).

In my last entry, I cited a case in which blogging had been at least tangentially helpful to aiding a blogger in getting a new job.

Others have noted the benefits of blogging for career success, as in this piece by Tim Bray:

You have to get noticed to get promoted.

You have to get noticed to get hired.

It really impresses people when you say “Oh, I’ve written about that, just google for XXX and I’m on the top page” or “Oh, just google my name.”

No matter how great you are, your career depends on communicating. The way to get better at anything, including communication, is by practicing. Blogging is good practice.

Bloggers are better-informed than non-bloggers. Knowing more is a career advantage.

Knowing more also means you’re more likely to hear about interesting jobs coming open.

Networking is good for your career. Blogging is a good way to meet people.

If you’re an engineer, blogging puts you in intimate contact with a worse-is-better 80/20 success story. Understanding this mode of technology adoption can only help you.

If you’re in marketing, you’ll need to understand how its rules are changing as a result of the current whirlwind, which nobody does, but bloggers are at least somewhat less baffled.

It’s a lot harder to fire someone who has a public voice, because it will be noticed.

Now, along comes a screed by the pseudonymous Ivan Tribble in the Chronicle of Higher Education questioning the concept of blogging for those in academia who are in the search or plan to seek tenure-track teaching positions. Tribble’s words are a bit worrisome to me since I will soon be in the academic job market.

Tribble particularly questions why academics feel they must broadcast “unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world.” He doesn’t like the fact that blogs are sometimes used as “therapeutic outlets” and venues “to vent petty gripes and frustrations.” To Tribble, a blog often degenerates into an “open diary or confessional booth, where inward thoughts are publicly aired.”

Tribble is particularly incensed that blogs allow the publication of a great deal of material without the peer-review process that is the heart and soul of academic publishing. Granted, the whole issue of electronic publishing without peer review is a hot button in the academic world. Both my partner and I count among our publications more than 100 articles apiece that are published online but were not peer-reviewed (except by each other). How will those articles be viewed as he applies for full-professor status this year and I seek my first post-PhD teaching position?

But back to blogging — Tribble cites several candidates who applied for teaching positions at his college who were hurt by their blogs (though he does admit that “we did not disqualify any applicants based purely on their blogs. If the blog was a negative factor, it was one of many that killed a candidate’s chances”).

The candidates’ blogging sins seemed to be as follows: One guy seemed to be far more passionate about a side interest or hobby than he was about the subject he was applying to teach. Another had a blog with numerous personal opinions that Tribble felt revealed a little more about the candidate than the search committee wanted to know. A third guy had misrepresented his research, a sin exposed not by his own blog but someone else’s.

These are all legitimate concerns, but they don’t say to me “don’t blog if you know what’s good for your career.” They simply say: Be careful. I can’t see, for example, similar concerns being raised by the authors of the blogs I cited in this entry, PhD students, like myself, who are using blogs to explore their research topics and whose blogs may document the narrative of our PhD programs. To me, Tribble’s concern below borders on paranoia:

The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.

And the way Tribble ended his column (below) just made me sad. People who seem perfectly OK when you talk to them, but they are somehow diminished when you get to know them better through the narratives of their blogs? I think we will see more and more people telling their stories very publicly in media such as blogs. Tribble should probably get used to this new reality.

Our blogger applicants came off reasonably well at the initial interview, but once we hung up the phone and called up their blogs, we got to know “the real them” — better than we wanted, enough to conclude we didn’t want to know more.

Christian Crumlish posted a blog entry in April 2005 about needing a job. While the initial post was aimed at some networking and broadcasting the need for the job, the total of three posts (here’s the one in the middle) became a mini-narrative of searching for the job, culminating with his blog entry on his attainment of the new job in June.

He seemed to realize along the way that it was wise to keep a little quiet about the search. I asked him to what extent he feels posting on his blog helped him obtain his new job.

His response:

It helped, I think, although it did not directly lead to the job I ended up taking. That came from a craigslist ad I responded to. I do think that my blog presence and my visibility (googlability) was a factor in gettting my new job, as my firm is looking to get its name out among the web savvy audience and they feel I can help with that. I’m very happy I put my job search into the public, because I think it strengthened my network. A lot of people gave me advice or passed along leads or sent my resume to their recruiters/HR people.

I kind of critiqued his initial post as I would a resume — since that’s what I do to make a living.

He started out by telling what HE wanted in a job. That’s not totally a bad thing because it’s good to as specific as you can about what you’re looking for. He used nice phrases like “I’d like to be part of something bigger than myself.” He also talked about wanting to “learn from people smarter than me and better at business.” That kind of phrase is tricky. It’s flattering to the reader to suggest that others are smarter than the writer/job-seeker, but all other things being equal, would you rather hire the guy who wants to learn, or the guy who already knows? Probably depends on your company’s culture. But I would have suggested he start with his fourth paragraph — which told what he had to offer, what he could contribute to a new employer.

He indicated a specific interest in the “social network system/software web application space,” which is great. Employers don’t want to have to guess what you want. And, as the writer he is, he finished that paragraph with three punchy, powerful sentences: “I want to help. I want to contribute. I want to influence.” Nice.

A couple of paragraphs later, he employs classic networking techniques — he doesn’t ask for a job; he asks for help and is specific about how readers can help.

Finally, in what he calls a “little value-add to make this entry useful to people beyond just me,” he shares some information about what he calls “all the now-traditional automated web tools and the job search elements that are starting to appear in social network systems, such as LinkedIn.” I just found the reference a little amusing because maybe in Crumlish’s world, these tools and job-search elements are traditional and well known, but I would guess that they are quite new and mysterious to the vast majority of job-seekers.

(And, hey, my critique doesn’t mean a whole lot since he did end up with a job.)

Crumlish’s saga is quite interesting, not only because it may have proven to be a successful way to land a job, but because he told the story of his job search, albeit a story with a lot of missing chapters.