I’ve posted a number of times on the growing importance of network management, and of personal brand and reputation development. Today’s RSS feeds bring a couple of interesting links on the subject: Stowe Boyd talks about a funny marketing campaign by a new careers site, Wurk.net. It’s a search engine, and directory, of careers-related sites and blogs. Interesting; I’ll have to explore it in more depth later. Fast Company have a piece on personal and career networks, and how they are becoming increasingly important for the young professional (and yes, I’m still young, darn it!). It also talks about the way that recruiting will change:
“In the future, [employers] aren’t going to advertise job openings anymore,” says Warren Bare, CEO and founder of Jobkabob, another job-matching service. “They’ll find you.”
And how (the right) employers find us if we aren’t actively managing our profile? Like most people, I google myself from time to time, which mostly turns up old usenet posts from 10 years ago, and mismatches from genealogical sites. I got concerned about online privacy fairly early on, so for a long time I only posted anonymously, or under pseudonyms. There are actually a number of very good reasons for doing this – not just to maintain privacy, but also because taking on a regular online persona allows us to pursue trains of thought and behaviours (not bad, just different to our normal ’self’) that can spur creativity. Momus has a good piece about this on his blog, and in his Wired column. Nowadays, I’m running this blog under my real name as a way to develop an online presence, and to aid network-building. I need to work a bit harder at it, maybe: the Fast Company article refers to a site, ZoomInfo, which provides filtered, relevant information on individuals’ online presence, for use by employers. I don’t show up – oops! I need to pay more attention to 12 Steps for business bloggers…
