Jennifer H is blogging for jobs

A reader, Jennifer H, just emailed us looking to announce her effort to blog for jobs. She writes;

I'm certainly blogging for jobs. I'm a marketing professional,entrepreneur, and published author, blogging away for exposure andpotential job offers.

I've been blogging an unpaid reader blog over at the SeattlePost-Intelligencer on the mistakes that small business owners make - andwhat they can do to fix those mistakes and run their business efficientlyand effectively!

You can read more both at the RSS feed on my author website and at theSeattle PI Reader Blog.

author site: http://www.jenniferheigl.com
biz blog: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/ingoodcompany/

Good luck Jennifer! Volunteering like that is a good way to get noticed. We love that you are blogging for jobs!

Blogger leaves comment, gets a job

Kudos to Andrew for this great job hunting story...

As of next Monday, I will be starting work for Outrider, a strategic marketing company based out of St. Louis. I will be coming on board as a Social Media Specialist and working with a small team of other people in the social media area to develop integrated online media strategies and marketing plans for clients. Anyone can see the world is shifting to a more online-centric, social place and the best evidence I can find of this is in the way I came into my new position.

A few weeks ago, I was reading Jeremiah Owyang’s blog and saw a post on people who were “on the move” in the social media industry. I thought, well what is wrong with a little bit of self-promotion? So I left a comment, which you are free to go check out for yourself, basically saying “Hey, I haven’t been on the move…but I would like to be!” And as a result of this, Lisa Young from Outrider reached out to me with some information about the company and the industry as a whole..then I spent a day and a half pouring through Google and every other internet tool I could think of to absorb as much information as I could about the company. Well over the past few weeks, about 97.4 emails, and dozens of hours spent researching different aspects of the company and industry I decided that I really wanted to come on board with the firm and so…here I go!

Blogging is good for recruiters

Here's an interesting article I found on ComputerWorld about blogging for jobs.

January 07, 2008 Corporate recruiters have long surfed the Web to vet potential hires, but now they're also surfing blogs to unearth job candidates, expanding their talent pool and gaining insights they say they can't get from resumes and interviews. Most blog-related recruits are professionals in technology and media because jobs in these fields often require knowledge of the blogosphere, says Kirsten Dixson, a founding partner at Brandego LLC, a career management firm in Exeter, N.H., that specializes in personal branding.In addition to blogs that focus on their industry or field of interest, recruiters say they check candidates' blogs about noncareer-related topics for evidence of writing skills and clues to how well rounded they are.

In June, Brian Balfour's blog, SocialDegree.com, inspired an unsolicited offer for a product manager job from an executive at Zoom Information Inc. "I was impressed by the points Brian was making and the way he was making them," says Russell Glass, vice president of products and marketing at the Waltham, Mass.-based technology company. The blog also offered details about Balfour's work history and education. "It was a no-brainer to give him a call and see if he'd be interested," Glass says.

Continues at CW >>

A blog creates career stability

Penelope Trunk's last column at Yahoo brings blogging to the forefront. I love what she has to say.

Today, that's not true. I've been blogging for almost two years, and while each week there are about 400 commenters on Yahoo! who say how stupid I am, there are also a bunch of people who make their way to my blog and become regular participants in the conversation there.

The blog is my own, and so is the community -- which is now about 150,000 people strong. The blog stays with me wherever I go, and that's important in a job market where people switch jobs every two or three years. A blog creates a network, and the network is yours. The conversation you create about your professional life is one that continues no matter what happens with your employer.

The workforce is extremely unstable today. There are layoffs, downsizings, de-equitizations, and bankruptcies. No one is guaranteed to have a job a month from now. Generations X and Y watched their parents' lives come undone when they depended on the workplace to provide stability in their lives. Today, people do that less and less.

We create our own stability in our lives by taking responsibility for ourselves. A blog is a great way to do this -- it's a professional platform that you have total control over, and you can use it to provide a home base when your work life feels like a game of dodge ball.

Web designer blogs and gets job

Great story about a 22 year old web designer who blogged to get the job.

I scrapped the resume and wrote a letter instead. In the letter I leveraged the success of my most recent site, Net Business Blog, to demonstrate my knowledge of the web industry. It worked. I got the job I wanted (as well as a ton of interviews with other companies).

Read the full story on his blog >>

QuintCareers article on blogs as resumes

FEATURE ARTICLE: USE YOUR BLOG AS A RESUME?
PART I: PROS AND CONS

by Katharine Hansen, Ph.D.

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.

Our full article at
http://www.quintcareers.com/job-seeker_blog_resume.html
considers the pros an cons of the blog as resume.

Article: Monster says blogging good for career

Monster's blog has a nice article about blogging for your career.

To Get Ahead in Your Career, Start Blogging

If you’re a young professional, let me give you one piece of advice that could quickly catapult your career into the stratosphere: Start blogging.

Here are two guys who have done just that:

• Ryan Healy had been out of college for less than year when he colaunched a blog for twentysomethings in the workforce called Employee Evolution in February 2007. Less than six months later, the well-known career author and blogger Penelope Trunk was so impressed with the expertise Healy was demonstrating through his blog that she started a company with him. At the ripe old age of 23, Ryan quit his entry-level corporate job and is now set to try his hand at running a career development company.
• Dan Schawbel, 24, writes the Personal Branding Blog. He’s already been hailed as a young turk of personal branding in Fast Company, has launched his own quarterly publication called Personal Branding Magazine and has been named the first-ever social media specialist by his employer, EMC.

Now could Ryan and Dan have landed their new gigs by following the traditional corporate path? Maybe. But it likely would have taken them years rather than months.

Full post >>

Top 100 HR blogs

Blog for Jobs recently made it onto the "Top 100 HR Bloggers " list.

http://www.businesscreditcards.com/bootstrapper/top-100-hr-bloggers/

Dan Schawbel's personal brand

In 6 months Dan Schwabel has made a name for himself via blogging. He just launched danschawbel.com;

I just launched a unique Personal Branding website ( DanSchawbel.com). I consider it to be the first 360 degree view of a Personal Brand, using myself as an example. My pitch is that everyone in the world will need to have their own custom version in order to have a successful career. I took my professional life and crossed it with my personal life and mixed it with my love for Personal Branding, while integrating it with all web 2.0 technologies.

Dan's the man!

Employer blogs about job, job seeker blogs to get job

About a year ago, this company posted a job opening on its blog. But it wasn't the usual job description of 'send us a resume'. They asked interested candidates to add a comment with a link to their online presence and a way to contact them.

Fred, however, quickly came up with a refinement of the idea – asking people to reply by commenting on the post and pointing us to their web presence, a blog, a site, or a profile page - that made the idea work. You can see the results by looking through the comments on our post. We did not get over run and the quality of the folks who commented blew us away.

Enter Andrew Parker. Here's his blog and website. He got the job.