Tag Archives: friendfeed

3 reasons even “social media types” still need a resume

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Remember Elle Woods and her scented, pink-paper resume in Legally Blonde? She’d be an anomoly today, as most people don’t print paper resumes anymore. But despite lamentations that “Google is the new resume” or “Resumes are useless in the Internet age,” you still need one if you plan to apply for a position at a large company. Even a social media position.

While those of us who blog, tweet, post, message and tag each other all day long would like to think that our online presence is enough to stand on its own as a testament to how smart and savvy we are, the human resources department is still going to want you to submit a formal application, which often includes uploading a resume. If you’re trying to land a job with a funky little start-up or a tiny shop with a handful of employees, then the resume matters less and all of your other online work will likely be a bigger factor. But if you’re looking for a job with a big brand or company, have it ready.

I’ve worked very closely with the HR department in some of my previous jobs, so I’ve had the chance to observe some of the machinations that go along with trying to hire someone at a large company. Here are three reasons why, no matter how sexy your blog, Posterous, Facebook page, LinkedIn profile or “personal brand’ might be, you still need to have a resume:

1. Your blog can’t be entered into a corporate resume database

There are several reasons big corporations use resume database-systems like BrassRing or HireGround. Probably the most important one is compliance. In order to be in compliance with myraid hiring laws with acronyms like OFCCP, EEO, and FLSA, companies with more than 100 employees need to show ratios of applicants to interviewees to hires, show that they have consistent hiring practices across the company, and show that they actively sought out diverse candidates.

Making each candidate go through an online hiring system, which usually includes a resume upload and screening questions, allows for easy data collection for compliance purposes. Companies can’t run your blog or Google profile through its screening processes when it comes time to file compliance reports each year.

2. The first cut of candidates may be made by someone who doesn’t know what a blog is

Often an HR associate sorts through the company resume database– sometimes arbitrarily, sometimes by keyword– to find an initial group of candidates to screen. This is where networking is huge. If you submit your resume online, it can be a total crapshoot whether it even gets viewed. But if you know the hiring manager or someone who can pass your resume along and help it move to the top of the pile, you’re in a much better position.

In all likelihood, however, the HR associate probably isn’t going to find and read your blog. It would be extremely time consuming to do that for each candidate in an initial screen. They may check you out on Google or LinkedIn in a cursory manner, but their goal is to fill the role as quickly as possible. That’s their metric. So unless someone tells them to flag your resume, you’re at the mercy of whether or not you appear in the database search results (so make sure you have the appropriate keywords in your resume).

3. Many companies still aren’t comfortable with social media for the hiring process

The mere fact that a company would hire for a social media position is a step in the right direction, but if they’re looking for someone with expertise in the area, it’s because they lack it. The hiring manager may not know where or how to start screening candidates based on their social presence. Should they be looking for quantity or quality of blog posts? Does number of Twitter followers matter? How many LinkedIn connections should the candidate have? Why aren’t they on FriendFeed? What is FriendFeed? Corporate HR and hiring managers are used to resumes, comfortable with resumes, and still expect resumes. They’re not quite sure yet how to integrate social media into established hiring practices.

Even a company like BestBuy, ahead of the curve on social media adoption, didn’t quite know how to structure a traditional job posting for its Emerging Media Manager role. Kudos to them for reaching out to the community and crowdsourcing ideas for key skills and requirements for the position. But anyone who applies  for the role must do so by submitting an application and uploading a resume via BestBuy’s corporate career site.

Yes, it would be great if someday we could all just let our work stand on its on merit wherever it happens to live online and not have to put together verbose and formal resumes. You certainly should mention and even highlight your online outposts on your resume (at least your blog and LinkedIn profile), and as you move further along in the hiring process there’s a greater chance that someone in the hiring process will take the time to look at your work. Just don’t expect the traditional resume to disappear any time soon.

To Europe, Courtesy of Social Media

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I’m on vacation right now. While you’re reading this, I’m off exploring museums, architecture, parks and cafes. Monsiuer Mengel and I are spending two weeks in Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris. And in large part, it’s due to social media. Here’s my guide to European Vacation, social media-style.

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1. Win free airfare by entering a blog contest

Yes, be jealous. We flew business class on OpenSkies from JFK to AMS courtesy of tickets I won from travel blog Gadling.com. The site was celebrating its anniversary by giving a pair of tickets away. All you had to do was leave a comment on their blog post and one commenter was randomly selected to win the tickets. That just happened to be lil’ ol’ me!

2. Start following various travel resources on Twitter

Over the past few months, I’ve been following accounts such as @raileurope and @visitholland. Both were helpful in offering information that allowed me to plan and make decisions about our trip. If I happened to notice a tweet about something I wanted to do or read more about on our trip, I would favorite the tweet as a way of bookmarking. A week before leaving, I went back and read through those favorited tweets and made some notes. I also enlisted help from local Albany twitterers for suggestions on the best way to get down to JFK (turns out this is the fastest and cheapest option).

3. Read travel blogs and bookmark content on Delicious and Evernote

I regularly read Gadling, Budget Travel’s This Just In and the New York Times Travel section/blog. Anytime I came across an article offering tips, advice or deals on the cities we were visiting, I bookmarked them via Delicious and tagged them as Europe. Sometimes I chose the “Do Not Share” option in Delicious, just so I wasn’t constantly sending out random articles via FriendFeed. Before the trip, I logged in to Delicious and sorted by the “Europe” tag, printing and highlighting any specific information I wanted to take with me. I also had a few conversations with friends who’d been to Amsterdam and captured their suggestions in an Evernote file that I can refer back to.

4. Check out hotels using TripAdvisor and Hotels.com review boards

We’re quite lucky in that we’re staying at a friend’s empty apartment while in Paris, but I needed to book hotels for Amsterdam, The Hague and Brussels. I relied heavily on the TripAdvisor message boards to make sure I wouldn’t be checking us in to a filthy hotel in a seedy part of town. (Sometimes there’s a reason for seemingly good hotel deals.) I also cross checked the amenities listed for each hotel with reviews done by people who had actually stayed there (is breakfast really free? Do they have WiFi in the rooms or just the common areas?).

5. Use Google StreetView to get the lay of the land

The apartment we’ll be staying in when we get to Paris next week is a bit out of town, near La Defense. We located it on Google Maps and then used the StreetView function to find restaurants that our friend recommended, find a nearby grocery store, and determine what landmarks we need to look for to point us in the right direction when we pop up from the Metro.

6. Pack some good old fashioned guide books

Since I don’t have an iPhone (wah), I can’t take advantage of this totally slick Amsterdam app that would tell me what to see, where nearby restaurants are, what museums are open, and more. So I’ll have to count on Frommer’s, Lonely Planet, and some printed e-mails with recommendations from friends to help us plan out our days. But hopefully next time I head to Europe, it’ll be with an iPhone that can calculate exchange rates, pull up Metro maps, tell me current museum discounts and even translate French on the fly. Someday.

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So, that’s how I got here. I’ve scheduled a few posts for while I’m gone, so hopefully you won’t miss me too much. And I plan to check in every now and then with the laptop to see how everyone’s doing and share a photo or two. I trust y’all to hold down the fort.

Until I get back… Vaarwell – Tot ziens – Au revoir!

Image via Flickr user pedrosimoes7

Who’s boarding the train to FriendFeed?

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friendfeed-logoI created a FriendFeed account a few months back but haven’t done much with it since. I liked the idea of linking all my social profiles together and getting all my online ducks in the same pond, but just didn’t feel like FriendFeed was really where most of my friends were. I had created a strong network on Twitter and didn’t want to have to go manually re-subscribe to all my Twitter pals on FriendFeed (and many of them didn’t have FriendFeed accounts). I liked the idea of some of the features (being able to comment on what someone tweets, bookmarks, or posts, for example) but couldn’t get into the habit of visiting the site more than maybe once a week. Even with the redesign that just launched, it just wasn’t sticky enough for me.

However, in the last few days I’ve had an influx of subsciption requests (currently my FriendFeed account is protected). Many of these have come from people whom I’ve nurtured relationships with on Twitter and I’m happy to let them subscribe and get a fuller picture of what I’m doing online. Some subscription requests seem fairly dubious and spammy and I’ve hit the ignore button on those. It’s not just me who’s noticed the increase:

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So what’s driving this spike in FriendFeed interest? Is there another Ashton/CNN race that I’m unaware of? Or is Jesse Newhart right and the “cool kids” are now moving away from Twitter as it becomes more mainstream, commercialized, spammy? He argues that FriendFeed offers a “more coherent conversation” and “better aggregation of content,” but I’m not entirely sold.

On the one hand, FriendFeed just seems like too much information for me. Follow someone like Robert Scoble and your FriendFeed stream turns into an endless aggregation of people liking and commenting on every single thing he posts. True, I don’t HAVE to follow anyone, just as with Twitter, but trying to keep the noise level down on FriendFeed means being very selective and not following any of the “big guns” who post prolificly and have legions of fans/harpies vying for attention via “likes” and comments. And it all comes through so fast that even though I follow just a tiny, tiny handful of people right now, it’s cluttered.

On the other hand, FriendFeed isn’t enough informaiton – meaning that for most of the people I subscribe to, it’s nothing more than a regurgitation of their Twitter stream. Why shouldn’t I just keep using Twitter, then? FriendFeed might add the occasional Flickr image or Delicious save, but for me, it’s mostly just Tweets.

To be fair, I’m sure that I’m not really using FriendFeed “the right way.” I haven’t set up or joined groups yet and I don’t have my feed segmented. I really haven’t taken the time to force myself to become comfortable with it, and maybe I won’t have to for a while.

I’m not sure if this increased interest means that the winds are changing and people will start rushing to FriendFeed soon. But if the point of social media is to “go where the conversations are” then we may all be heading toward FriendFeed sooner than we think.

Do you use FriendFeed? Is it a substitute of compliment to Twitter for you? How do you sort through all the information it provides?