In this who-has-a-job-anymore climate, I have received a few requests to redact certain stories in the blog, or remove names from Flickr sets so certain posts do not show up in a Google search performed by hiring managers or potential employers. During these conversations I have also been warned that I might live too much of my life online, and that my social life makes me appear to be too "exuberant" to be hire-able. This does concern me, but ultimately I decided that keeping this blog is important to me, and the benefits of this forum outweigh the perceived risks.First of all, I do not this this online journal is all that salacious. Even I have a filter, and I have witness many things, and thought many thoughts, which do not go online. I do live a vibrant social life and I am truthfully offended that I should feel the need to obscure or apologize for it. I have have had too many mentors go to their grave with the same parting advice, perhaps best expressed as a paraphrase of Thoreau: I shall not spend my life so that when I come to die discover that I had not lived. Live is short, and precious, and I intend to live it before I die. Perhaps my formative education focused too much on life-lesson literature, but I took those morals to heart. Not these least of which is that too much of the world operates not by what they think is best, but out of fear of what others might think. If you have respect for yourself, and behave ethically, you should not worry too much about what the neighbors think.
My life is lively, and at times it is out there. No return, no deposit, and no regrets (plenty of mistakes, and okay, maybe a few regrets). Of this I am proud, not ashamed. And it makes me impossible to smear or blackmail. I own up to it all. I see that as a strength of character, not a flow.
There is also a matter of integrity at play (at work?) here. As an integral part of both growing up and coming out, I made a deliberate decision to live my life honestly and openly, and I am not willing to lie, obfuscate or be ashamed of the truth for the sake of potential and unknown busybodies whose internal shame manifests itself in puritanical judgment of others' personal lives. I have proven myself time and again. My work product is exceptional, as it my work ethic. If a potential employer seeks to judge me, it should be on that basis.
Some friends have counseled me that I am naive to hold such an ideal—that "it does not work that way in the real world." That argument makes me bristle. I have spent so much of my life striving to live with integrity, I feel that I should be able to expect the such from others as well. And while I appreciate and require gainful employment, I also hope that I could work for someone or some company I could respect. And those who would filter qualified candidates based on a capricious judgment of their private lives are not respectable. "Judge not" and all of that. (It could be argued that by keeping a public journal my private life is no longer private, yet I retain control of what I share (giving an incomplete picture at best), and in truth my private life remains separate and distinct from my professional life. And while written down, my personal does remain my private life, even if some episodes are aired for entertainment's sake.
I like my blog and I'm keeping it. If that limits my professional opportunities, so be it. But I find such judgments to be, at their least, hypocritical, and that in the extreme. Would a tea-totalling recruiter deny me an opportunity because drinking stories are in the blog? Would a homophobe send my resume to the trash can? Would a delicate professional of another generation judge my personality as too racy to be professional? Perhaps I have lived in San Francisco too long, or they not long enough. To them I would point out that I my social life is tame by comparison, and that everyone has a social side, and should not be professionally evaluated for it (presuming of course personal life is note directly related to the position question—what should an employer care if one of their editors spends every third Saturday dressed up like Little Bo Peep?). That, and odds are I would not enjoy working for a tea-totaller or a bigot either.
So I'm keeping the blog as it is, a little pushy, but still within limits. It give me a necessary creative outlet, a forum, a soapbox, a little popularity (over 85 thousand hits so far), and a little celebrity. Not to mention, some professionals love the blog. I get fan mail. I also get freelance writing offers. Because of the blog, I'm on the masthead of a southern magazine as their West Coast Correspondent. The blog can be, professionally, a good thing.
All that being said, I am more than happy to redact and reclassify to suit my friends who need to put their best resume forward or avoid cyber-stalking psycho ex-boyfriends.
The most recent request to rename all photos and to introduce a pseudonym came from XYZ, who cited a new search engine from CareerBuilder and Microsoft for hiring managers called Applicant Explorer. Applicant Explorer is pitched to hiring managers so they can find out see how candidates live their lives online or in social networks—basically, their personal life. (Which as I understand it gets off-limits quickly when it comes to legal hiring practices.)
This sounded horribly insidious to me and I checked it out. Here's the link to HR Morning's story on the new search engine. They write:
The engine collects all references to candidates’ names on the Web, giving you a picture of their “online footprint.” Results will include comments posted on message boards, social networking profiles, contributions to blogs and articles that mention the candidate.I am heartened by the comments to this story by professional hiring managers:
(Revised and updated 09/15/09)
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