‘Bloggers Need Not Apply’
An eye-opening post at Chronicle Careers notes that your blogging may come back to bite you when you should expect it: During your job interview process.
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.
This post (obviously) has been generating a lot of buzz on the web (among bloggers) who promote the platform daily, weekly, hourly.
Watch out, they warn, Big Brother may be watching from their ivory towers:
You may think your blog is a harmless outlet. You may use the faulty logic of the blogger, “Oh, no one will see it anyway.” Don’t count on it. Even if you take your blog offline while job applications are active, Google and other search engines store cached data of their prior contents. So that cranky rant might still turn up.
While I agree heavilly that you shouldn’t write anything you don’t want your mom or your current/future employer to read, I do find it interesting that this post is considerably rant-like in its own right (they discourage negative blogging), but then again, the author is using a pseudonym, and he’s writing about an anonymous college in non-specific Mid-western America–safe behind the curtain…. unless the blogosphere has their way with him.
Links:
- Bring me the head of Ivan Tribble!
- But would you do it again?
- “A pretty case of paltry legacies.”
- No, this doesn’t make me paranoid
- Other Google Results
- Technorati Results
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