Job Hunting: Your Blog as Your Resumé

This was a note I sent to our b5media bloggers internally. I am reposting it here with some key information modified for public consumption.

I can come across as cocky, and for that I apologize. In You Can Blog, the book Jeremy and I are getting set to publish, we have a chaper dedicated to how blogging can help your job. That is, your existing job, getting a new job, making you better in a job, etc.

He had never seen my resume but was able to comment on some of the things he had read here at Technosailor. It was like he knew me!

Darren often writes on Problogger about how to make money with a blog. That is, how to make your blog your job. Awhile ago, we had a debate in his comments about the difference between direct Problogging and indirect problogging - that is making money from your blog or making money because of your blog. I challenged some of the folks during those days that problogging was more than getting ad revenue and sponsorship as a result of a blog and that there were many people who were probloggers because they leveraged the power of the blog to get book deals, get new jobs, make non-blog revenue via opportunities presented because of their blog, but independent of their blog.

I’ve got a story to share as an encouragement to some folks, especially those who might be having a hard time finding your ebb and flow making money from your blog, either here at b5media or elsewhere. While we want you to make money, I think if you took away a success story like this all of us would be stoked for you.

Recently (like this past week), it became clear that I was ready to leave my job, hit the job market and test my resume out there. I don’t want to rehash the story. You can read it here. That entry is dated Feb 9th (Thu) but I actually began writing it on Feb 7 and advanced published it on the 8th. On the 9th (Thu), after some thinking about what I said in the first entry, I published this entry.

Now, most of you know me at least in some way. Some of you have been reading my blog since I was a wee little blogger and some of you have been following much more recently and some of you only know my name from here at b5media and server migrations, etc. You know my drive, you know my work ethic, you know my obsessive compulsive way of working. I’m not saying this is good or bad, but I imagine it has been observed.

“Getting” the intropsection that I was dealing with in writing the second entry I linked to will likely help you realize that I am very serious about what my next job is. Because a job is something that helps me identify who I am, simply collecting a paycheck every two weeks is not enough for me. I am very picky and have chosen not to put my resume out on the job market in the usual method. No Monster or Career Builder. No Dice or talking to headhunters. No… I am going to pick my next job.

After writing the entry on Thursday morning, I came home that night and did a very limited search looking for work. I started on Craigslist and started looking for companies that were hiring, that seemed to know what they were doing, that were able to write correctly (LOL!), etc. There were lots and I skipped over most. There were 8 that interested me to a degree and I could have responded to them right from CL.

Instead I went looking at their company websites. How well did they maintain their company image? If they were a web consulting company, I looked at their source code for tell tale signs of technology they were using, or styles of coding that were used. I looked for individual people’s names and Googled them, finding out as much as I could about the company before deciding if I wanted to work there. Then, if I felt comfortable that I wanted to work there, I sent emails. Now this is the experiment I did, and the point of this entry. There were 4 companies I sent emails to. 2 of them I sent my resume to and 2 of them I did not. My email signature has a link to most of my blogs in it so I knew that my blogs were available for review but I did not highlight them anymore than that they were actually in my signature.

Two of these firms, one with a resume and one without, never replied to my email. Two of them, however, did. One of the firms that got back to me was one of the non-resume emails. I did NOT send them my resume and the company was in contact with me within a few hours of sending the initial resume.

We spent an hour and a half in a phone interview spent an hour and a half Friday talking about all kinds of technical and business stuff. He had never seen my resume but was able to comment on some of the things he had read here at Technosailor. It was like he knew me! We talked about some of the hard lessons I’ve learned through my work here at b5 and elsewhere. Just back and forth good dialogue.

The point of this super long entry is to encourage you guys that blogging has direct benefits outside of the direct revenue that you may get. It is a way to boost your profile in your niche and even, as in my case, open the door for new employment benefits. My resume to this company was merely my blog. I had to provide no more. He could read and get so much more of a feel for who Aaron Brazell was than a simple 2-3 page summary of my professional life.

Tagged as: job_search