Martin Cleaver, masterfully.

In My Blog Got Me a New Job ex-Ernst & Young Rod Boothby explains how his blog enhances the chances of landing a new job, and how he attributes his job offer to having lowered the risk to potential employers by being seen to be more transparent and open. In this posting I extend this with the Johari window, and the effects of mass-socialization.

Hiring a blogger means hiring a known quantity

The first candidate … simply handed you a 2 page resume + 1 page cover letter. The second candidate has done the same, but they have also included a link to their blog. Now, further imagine that although the blog gives a more detailed picture, it does not change your opinion of the second candidate.

… you have more information from all the blog posts, … how they have handled angry comments, … [gives a] better idea of how that candidate is going to perform.

…. the blogger … [is] a known quantity.

In MBA-speak this is an issue of Information Asymmetry, a type of Market_failure:

In economics, information asymmetry occurs when one party to a transaction has more or better information than the other party.

Information asymmetry models assume that at least one party … has relevant information [that] the other(s) do not.

Although information asymmetry has recently been noted to be on the decline thanks to the Internet, … it is still heavily applied to human resource and personnel economics.

Most people have had the experience of working with someone who’s behavior seems somewhat odd. Its often not until you have compared notes with others around you that you can really determine the extent the validity of your observations.

Thus an individual may present themselves as one way (facade) or perhaps they are pathologically hiding something from themselves. In turn that Blind Spot may be a matter of:

1. Unapproachability if no one has told them
2. Denial or unadaptability for the individual if they’ve been told it before

The internet keeps bloggers accountable

We all have weaknesses, but the transparency of the blogosphere brings us all to a new level of accountability. At some point most bloggers can expect comments back, maybe anonymous, maybe from people that have just interpreted something they’ve just said, and maybe from someone they used to work with. The fact that the comments can be anonymous facilitates a shift for those afflicted by (1, Unapproachability). The masters of spin will truly learn something from (2, Denial) if comments pile up but people don’t buy their lies.

How much of this will be accepted by older generations?

As an online public-personal memory, the feedback from open conversations on a blog could serve us to help us (or force us) to mature. Last week at TorCamp pre-xmas drinks, Ryan Coleman and I discussed that our histories are now indelibly imprinted in places like the Internet Archive (standing today at 85,898,456,616 webpages, including old copies). i.e. the archive may have a copy, even if you delete something from your blog.

But while, in 5 years time, mid-thirties aged managers are likely to understand norms of today’s 16 year olds (i.e. how just everything should be explained to the whole world), those same 21 year olds may have a hard time forgetting, re-interpreting and, in particular, justifying to a 50-something background HR department why they made a public declaration of such tragically hurt feelings. And that would be if they were lucky enough to have a chance to explain it: more likely their resume would just get dumped.

A blog per role

As adults we play many roles: e.g. parents, client account manager, medical patient. I know many people have multiple blogs, targeting their conversations according to persona, the separation allowing the maintenance of appropriate power relationships.

It’s my understanding that a person’s values don’t typically become known to oneself (left side of the window) until their late 20s. And what’s known to others (top row of window) used to depend on who you socialized with, and their memories fade, or got reinterpreted, in line with yours.

Society norms expect information to fade, but on the internet it just piles up.

Having information attributed to the individual changes this. An individual blogging everything on a single blog changes this. Others knowing and linking across your multiple blogs changes this, as do social network analysis tools that scrape together XFN ’self’ relationships and synthesize commonalities into pictures like this:

All these factors reinforce the amount of information known about each and every participant on the ‘net. As much as privacy laws may prohibit organizations from disclosing information, the information inferable and brought together by sites such as zoominfo (or any of many clones in off-shore places) moves the world into new levels of cultural acceptance of past disclosure.

Our new world is one of Mass Socialization. Learn to live in it, and, be good. You never know who will be reading. It might just be an HR screener for your next job.

Technorati : Job, Social Network Analysis

This entry was posted on Monday, December 18th, 2006 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Blogging, Social Media, TorCamp, Culture, Organizational Transparency. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.