Blog CV: my life as a blog

Jason Kottke writes: “Anyone who meets me online — including possible friends, fellow Web design enthusiaists, or potential employers — has access to 4+ years of my thoughts before they even have to strike up a conversation. That’s damn powerful stuff.” Yep, so much so that I currently feel it would be tough to hire someone who is not a blogger. It would feel like they were hiding something.

A couple weeks ago, Krzysztof Kowalczyk argued that the best resume is a blog. “My opinion is that it’s impossible to tell anything from a typical resume. So a guy says he knows PHP. Does it mean that he’s a PHP guru who has written 100k lines of PHP code or that he’s just finished ‘Learn PHP in 15 minutes’? No way to tell. My idea: blog your resume. In addition to a standard resume keep a log of all the stuff you’re learning and doing. E.g. if today you wrote a 5k lines perl script that spiders the web and extracts interesting info, you would to your log a dated entry: Finished 5k line Perl script to spider the web. Used LWP::Simple module… ”

Curriculum Vitae means “a summary of one’s education, professional history, and job qualifications, as for a prospective employer.” CVs inevitably distort and elide. History is written by the victors; likewise CVs are overwritten by our winning ideas. Our missteps, mistakes and stupidities get forgotten.

A blog captures our professional and personal accretions in real-time, records the quality of our interactions and snap-shoots our judgements. Other important factors get recorded: do we play well with the other children in our class? do we share credit? do we collaborate? listen? articulate? admit mistakes? grow?

This transparency may be a crucial selling point for Weblogs4hire. Don’t hire a blogger to blog for you. Hire her because you understand her skills and personality. Because you trust her. Because she’ll fit better with your team, last longer, and (not least) communicate better.