As a freshly minted grad still finalizing my next steps, I was curious to read today’s WSJ post on bloggers who have used their blogs in their job searches. The verdict – it helps as a conversation starter and in one case, as evidence of “social media savvy”, but it useless for job leads.
It makes sense – think of how many bloggers there are. In its report “State of the Blogosphere” Technorati estimates the number of blogs at over 133 million. And this number does not include blogs that are not indexed by Technorati. That shows you that blogging, like twittering, can have a one-way “broadcasting” direction that lets the author express him- or herself but does not necessarily lead to a conversation. To have a conversation, you need to engage people, to be timely in your topics and to have a purpose.
The WSJ bloggers had a purpose – to find a job. However, because this purpose was more about the process of finding a job, rather than about anything that may have been of tangible value to companies (i.e. sales expertise, marketing clout, innovations in product design), it did not lead to a conversation with recruiters. It probably had as much relevance as saying you took yoga classes on the weekends. Nice, so what? Blogs help people be perceived as experts or, at least, voices of opinion in a domain. Being a domain expert in looking for a job is probably not an expertise you want to retain forever.
