If you believe that Robert Scoble is the most powerful geek blogger in the world, you will agree that having a popular blog will increase your ‘market value’ in a recruiter’s eyes beyond one’s imagination and will get you almost any job that you want. Not only Scoble, a lot of people / companies including Tekriti have immensely benefitted because of the blogs that they maintain.

But is there a flip side to it? I contributed my thoughts to a Financial Express article by Banasree Purkayastha which talks about the fairness of judging a prospective employee based on his / her blog or another online journal.

I think the article covers the subject very articulately. When I am hiring somebody, particularly a senior team-member, I do a quick google search on the person or read up few of his / her blog-posts (if there exists one) to know the mental make up of the person. I can live with a few incapabilities or technological short-comings in a person but the attitude is something which cannot be compromised. For one potentially brilliant guy who doesn’t have the right attitude, I will not let the company culture be affected. And the blog lets me get that information quite easily / accurately.

As I said in the article - the fact that a employer can find out about a prospective employee through his / her blog works well for both the parties. The advantages for an employer are pretty obvious. For an employee, it’s even better as they are likely to perform best in a place where they are hired after knowing that his / her mindset and of others in that company are aligned.

From the article:

More and more recruiters and employers are checking out the online profiles of potential candidates in a bid to filter out the ‘not-so-fitting’ employee. According to a recent survey by ExecuNet, an executive job search and recruiting network in the US, 35% of executive recruiters said they dropped a job candidate because of information uncovered online. That is up from 26% just one year ago. Another 77% of respondents said they use search engines to learn more about prospective employees. And the trend is making inroads in India too.

“I think blogs/online journals give a very good idea of a person. Blogosphere is built on the assumption that people, in general, are genuine and they write things that they really feel about, and the assumption is very valid. A blog tells us a lot many things about a person, like his mental setup, if he likes to work in a team or works better as an individual, etc. At times, it also gives information on anything fake the person might have written on the resume,” says Kumar.

Read the complete post here. I wrote a similar post at GoingOn and Syven made a good comment, which is copied below:

The recruitment industry isn’t today exactly the epitomy of perfection, but times change mindsets and what looks like an act of negligence today could transform ito wise cultural language tommorrow. It is true that the future is always looking backwards and I don’t want to paint bloggers as martyrs, but when a massive shift in public opinion occurs, recruiters will begin to hire those who show their hearts, rather than hide behind their glossy personal brand. Remember it was only 50 years ago a negro guy in America wasn’t allowed to use the same toilet as his white counterpart. Mindsets like that changes with experiences and time, don’t they?

Update: Chetan has a nice post on his views on the subject, which is opposite to mine. Though I don’t agree exactly (as noted in the comments on this post), he has some good points.

Most of the projects that we do in Tekriti are special to me, as one of the selection criteria is their coolness and utility value. This criteria is one which is very important as it allows us to be very upbeat and excited about the stuff we do. But I will single out 2 projects currently for a special mention - GoingOn and PeopleAggregator. These are 2 products which are very special to my company. In this post, I am going to talk about GoingOn and the next post will be dedicated to PeopleAggregator - I will talk about the other projects with time and as we make further progress.

As the text on the site says: “GoingOn is a growing network of corporate, media, nonprofit, and individual brand networks that share on a common weblog publishing and community management platform”

Few of the points, in no particular order, which makes the system special are:

• First complete meta-network: GoingOn is the first system which lets you create social networks on the fly. You can choose the name of the network, specify a URL, upload the logo and banner images, specify the network categories and tags, choose the layout in terms of number of columns, choose the color themes, etc. It also maintains a network directory, which is used to discover more networks of a particular interest. We provide a single sign-on to all the networks, where ‘Joining a Network’ is pretty straight-forward.
• Hosted social network, with a subscription model for paid networks: The business model for the platform revolves around hosting the social network for you. So, whether it’s a basic (free) network or one of the paid networks, GoingOn hosts the network for you - so that you don’t have to worry about maintaining it. If it’s a paid network, you just have to pay a monthly fee which depends upon the type of network you are creating.
• Micro-content creation using Structured Blogging as the default publishing platform: The content publishing platform not only lets you create blogs but other micro-content like Reviews, Events, Audio, Video, People Showcase utilizing Structured Blogging - implicitly supporting the micro-formats. This will be the first social network again which uses Structured Blogging as the default publishing platform.
• Network Customization: Not only can you choose from various layouts and the color themes, you can also customize the homepage of your network by placing various modules / blocks in the left, right and center of the homepage. Apart from this, you can also dynamically customize a top-level tab of the network and put relevant content in it. So - a ecommerce site will want to put a ‘Products’ tab there but a Blog may have ‘About’ tab - it all depends upon the network administrator.
• Member Page Customization: As a user, you have an option to customize ‘your page’. You have a set of modules to choose from (and the list will only keep growing with time) like ‘My Tags’, ‘My Flickr’, ‘My Media Gallery’, ‘My Connections’, ‘My Networks’ which can be enabled / disabled and moved around on the page.
• People Subscription: The RSS feed for a person will not only have their blogs but will have their other micro-content and media gallery, essentially making it a compound feed.
• Access Control: All profile fields have access control - so you can make individual fields visible to everybody, by categories of connections (friends, online connection, lead,clients, family, etc.) , to only 1st degree friend, to only 2nd degree friends, etc.
• Web Services Integration: Apart from the commonly used web-services like Flickr, delicious in social networks, GoingOn provides you services provided by other Web 2.0 companies from within the system. So - if you can power feed management through Newsgator, you can also export your contacts to Salesforce and get the online reputation management done by Opinity. The list will only grow and I will provide my experiences with each as and when we do the integration.
• Advanced Editorial publishing system: The platform also gives a network administrator functionality to invite authors, editors who can create editorial posts. These posts appear separate from the Member Posts (Blogs, etc.) and gives the administrator appropriate permissions to place the 2 content appropriately on the homepage. It also gives network administrators advanced back-of-the-house tools for content and member management.
• Personal Blog and External Blogs: Every GoingOn member gets a GoingOn blog and flexibility to add multiple external blogs. The GoingOn system will not only display the posts from External blogs but also lets you route your posts from your GoingOn blog to your external blogs.

If you want to know more about the platform, take a tour here and then create an account yourself and play with the system.

Look forward to our Beta release next month - I will have a lot more to write when we make the announcement.

Disclaimer: All the features I have mentioned above are not still built in the system but we will keep adding them with time.

One of the things that was on the top of my priority list, the past few days, was planning the online network for the OnHollywood conference that Tony Perkins and AlwaysOn organizes. The conference started on May 2nd, 2006 and got over on May 4, 2006. The entire team worked hard for it and enjoyed the fact that the system was used by a lot of real people with the member count of the network as around 40,000 members (courtesy migrated members from AlwaysOn)

OnHollywood conference network was hosted as one of the network on the GoingOn system - a hosted network of networks. We disabled creation of network functionality during the conference so that we don’t change too many variables at a time and we wanted to see how does the system react during the actual use and not just simulated use.

The next step is planning for a public Beta where we will be enabling a lot of features which were disabled so far deliberately. So, if you haven’t checked out, check out the OnHollywood network - create an account for yourself or log-in and check the “My Member Page” customizaton. More customizations will be allowed to a network administrator - that will be visible once you create a network as we enable the functionality.

The video archives of the OnHollywood 2006 Panels is here, if you are interested.