Login
Membership has its privileges. Choose a username and provide a working email - that's all it takes to join. Click below to make a new account.
Make a new account
 NEWS
|
|
|
 TECH
NEWS
|
|
|
 FREE
STUFF
|
|
|
 BLOGGING
|
|
|
 PROJECTS
|
|
|
|
|
|
Blogging Makes Its Entry Into Both Sides Of the Job Market
By Sanjay Sharma, Section Blogging
Posted on Sun Oct 03, 2004 at 07:50:28 AM EST
(QBTPL's software design allows you to create individual blogs. If you sign up on any one of the sites that QBTPL has created, you will find that each registered user has a "Diary." This diary can be used for blogging, and on all our sites this feature is available for free. All it takes is a user name and valid email address to create a registered account. You can create an account on this site (www.qbtpl.com) itself and try your hand at blogging ... for free.)
Five years ago, few people had heard of blogs ? online journals that are commonly used to chronicle the lives and opinions of their authors. Now, blogging is spreading in the job market, said hiring managers and experts who study blogging. Based on anecdotal information people are using blogs on both sides of the job search process. A driving factor behind job market blogging is the search engine Google, said Elizabeth Lawley, associate professor of information technology at the Rochester Institute of Technology. "If you are thinking of interviewing someone, it's almost standard now to Google them online and see what you find," Ms. Lawley said. "If that person has a blog, it's usually the first thing that comes up."
An approach is to simply blog intelligently about your work or industry, Professor Halavais said. "Those looking to hire will notice you through your blog as a passive candidate, and that's often a much better way to find a job." "That's the advantage of blogging ? if you do it well and have interesting things to say, people pay attention," says Hugh MacLeod, creative director at Alcazar, an advertising agency in Newcastle, England. Corporate recruiters use blogs to draw in qualified candidates, and they search for potential hires by reading bloggers who write about topics relevant to a particular industry. Job seekers use blogs to establish a strong online presence, display their skills and advertise their availability. For many just out of college, the blog is an essential networking tool because it is common for bloggers to link back and forth to others with recent posts.
- "It's a trend on the rise right now," Michael Gartenberg, a vice president and research director at JupiterResearch in New York who covers blogs said, "especially for employers, who get a much better sense of a person this way. R?sum?s and interviews are a very scripted process; read someone's Web log and you get a good sense of that person's thinking and perspectives."
- Alexander C. Halavais, a professor in the School of Informatics at the State University of New York at Buffalo who studies blogs, also expects blogs to play a larger role in the job market. "Right now," Professor Halavais said, "recruiting this way is invisible, it's not institutional yet. But I would be surprised if, fairly soon, we didn't see blogs become a much bigger part of job searching and recruiting,"
At Microsoft, several hundred employees blog using a portal hosted by Microsoft Communities. The company has no official blog or blogging policy, but the unofficial practice has been a boon to the company's recruiters. "I have great candidates in process that have resulted from blogging," wrote Heather Hamilton, a senior marketing recruiter at the company, who posted her note in May on Heather's Marketing at Microsoft Blog. "Personally I think blogging is going to change the way companies recruit."
 |
|
