Twitter. Blogger. LinkedIn. A few short years ago, none of these Social Media sites would have been at the top of your list as career tools. However, many people today include them on their lists but still are not sure how exactly they fit into their academic job searches, let alone their careers. We spend some time this month with Rick Klau who heads up Google’s Blogger product. In addition to learning about Rick’s “Niner” love and how he was a blogger for a future President, we were privileged to get Rick to share his deep knowledge about how people communicate on the internet and his insights into how it can help you in your career and job search.
After reading, we invite you to continue the discussion in our LinkedIn group or follow HigherEd Careers on Twitter.
Andrew Hibel, HigherEdJobs.com: How do you believe today’s web, and social media, is forcing the resume to evolve into something more robust, call it Resume 2.0 if you will?
Rick Klau, Business Product Manager for Blogger, Google: The web certainly makes your past contributions more obvious and discoverable, so that the resume becomes less important as a way to define your accomplishments. In many ways, your LinkedIn profile is your resume. The resume used to be the tool you used to notify people who you were, what you did. The onus was on you to find the people hiring who you wanted to work for. Now, being visible online makes it easier for people interested in your skills to find you. I think that’s important.
Hibel: Many people are talking about their online presence, or brand, as an important tool in managing your career. How would you advise people who are looking to manage their online brand and what effects do you think it has on people’s careers?
Klau: I’ve never been a big fan of “managing” your brand – the more managed it is, the less authentic it is, and that will show. The more visible you are, the more discoverable you will be to the people who want someone like you – they may not know you, but they know who they’re looking for. Contributing online, being active in conversations about issues that matter to you – that makes you a very attractive candidate.
Hibel: As a culture, we sometimes have a desire to make good things even shorter (see the 4-minute exercise machine1 and speed dating2) and the social media world has certainly had a buzz about microblogging (Twitter) of late. A few weeks ago, at the Blogger World Expo, you made a thoughtful presentation about the symbiotic relationship between microblogging and blogging3. Could you share some of the main themes about your remarks?
Klau: As Twitter and Facebook have grown, so have services like Blogger. Some communications lend themselves well to short messages, while others require more elaboration – which is where the blog fits in. As a notification mechanism (among other things), Twitter does a great job drawing attention to those longer posts – and inviting conversation back on the site where the content was created. The blog is often the most search engine-friendly collection of content the person has, so it can be what people initially find… which can lead to people following the writer on Twitter. I think both are ultimately symbiotic in that way – the blog leads to increased community at Twitter, Twitter leads to increased engagement on the blog.
Hibel: In light of your persuasive value statement for blogging today, how do you think professionals in higher education, whether they be faculty or administrators, can start to make blogging a part of their career portfolio, or “Resume 2.0”, in 2010? How did you start your blog4?
Klau: I started my blog in 2001, in part because I was concerned that my entire professional reputation was tied to my job at the time with a CRM software company. My blog gave me a way to express opinions outside of my core role at the time, while also engaging directly with people whose opinions I valued. For anyone looking to get started, I’d go to http://blogsearch.google.com/ and type in a few queries related to your role, subscribe to the feed of results in Google Reader. Check on that periodically – you’ll get a good sense of who’s already writing about topics of interest to you. Leave comments on their blog if you have things to say, or start writing up your own reactions and link to them. Your engagement will provide visibility, which will lead to a growing community of people reading what you have to write. Final note – make it authentic, and personal. It’s your blog – let people know who you are. If you’re a Bears fan, write a post about Jay Cutler’s 5 interceptions (as a Niners fan, I thank him!). People will respond to that kind of genuine post.
Hibel: At Blogger, in what ways are you seeing people utilize your tools for job searches, personal branding, and networking?
Klau: Don’t have much to say re: job searches – I don’t look that granularly at our usage. But personal branding is a clear goal with many users – simply including your name in the title of your blog can immediately put you in the top search results for your name. This lets you participate in, if not direct, others’ perception of you online – a key first step in owning your brand online. From a networking perspective, blogging is a terrific tool for meeting similarly engaged people who care about topics that you care about – follow their blog, leave comments, link to them… they’ll do the same, and you’ll build tremendous personal and professional relationships as a result.
Hibel: What ways are Blogger and other Google products being utilized in higher education?
Klau: Probably easiest to point to this page which lays out a number of tools: (hyperlink removed due to link no longer active). Google Apps (Gmail, Docs, Calendar, GTalk) are increasingly being used by universities to improve campus-wide communication and collaboration. I’ve seen Google Sites used in classrooms for curricula, Blogger used as a way for classes to take notes and document research, Google Earth to present geo data in a compelling fashion. (See this project from my alma mater for one example: (link no longer active). Suffice it to say, students are some of the best users of our products – the answer to this question could take a long time. 🙂
Hibel: In chapter 1 of, Internet Your Way to a New Job5 by Alison Doyle, she mentions the internet has emerged as the primary networking tool via Social Media Websites. How important do you feel developing and maintaining traditional networks?
Klau: I don’t think it’s either/or. Clearly personal connections still play a large role for any successful networker – often drawing on the same skills but applied in person vs. online. Your network (online or off) shouldn’t just be measured in terms of numbers, it should be measured in terms of who’s willing to help you accomplish your goals. People who’ve met you IRL are often going to be more motivated to help you because of that personal connection – and that shouldn’t be undervalued.
Hibel: In your career both with Google and before, you had lots of experience with recruiting talent. In Chapter 10 of, Internet Your Way to a New Job6, the topic of utilizing sites such as YouTube and Second Life for interviews could be an emerging trend. Reflect upon what you feel are some emerging social tools that people will be using for job searching, networking, and interviewing. What do you think of using YouTube and Second Life for recruitment?
Klau: I personally don’t see a lot of value in Second Life as a recruiting tool, but I have read other companies having some success with it. Google is quite rigorous in its hiring process – knowing someone here will help get you identified as being interested in a role, but you still need to have a stellar record of accomplishment, be ambitious, and be “Googley”. The tools used to evaluate that talent today remain mostly people, using critical judgment… which tools get used for facilitating the interactions with those candidates seems a far less important focus for me.
Hibel: It’s funny that you used the word “Googley”; we often use the very non-academic word “Academicy” in describing how candidates need to present themselves to employers. I think it goes back to the authenticity of who you are and the cohort you are a part of. What would you call your #1 sin of being non-authentic?
Klau: When you tell me what I want to hear instead of telling me what you care about. I’ll take a passionate person I disagree with over a yes-man any day of the week.
Hibel: How do you feel about people using Social Media to research companies, search committee members, and potential coworkers?
Klau: I’m surprised when they don’t. As a candidate, you need to be careful to not come across like you’re stalking people – but I think it’s unusual (if not outright lazy) if a candidate is in an interview and they don’t have even a passing familiarity with the interviewer and/or the team they’re talking to.
Hibel: As a follow up to the previous question, how would you advise people to use Social Media, especially those seeking jobs? And would that differ if they were a faculty member or an administrator?
Klau: Well, let’s take a specific example. If someone were interviewing with me, I’d expect them to know I have a blog and am active on Twitter. Even a cursory glance at either would tell someone a lot about what I’m working on, what matters to me – and would make an interviewee very well equipped to get context about what matters most in people who will work with me. I don’t think it changes much depending on who the interviewee is – probably matters more who the interviewer(s) is/are.
Hibel: An area that is just now emerging strongly is mobile technology and applications. How much do you see the job search being managed on the go rather than in the thoughtful solitude of a work or home? How do you think that will impact recruiting?
Klau: I’ve used LinkedIn’s iPhone app (and before that, their very good mobile web app) to look up someone who I’d just met. I could see an interviewee doing that in between interviews, if they didn’t know who they were meeting ahead of time… but for the most part, I don’t see “on the go” being a primary use case for “finding a career”. I’d hope people put more time into it than the few minutes they spend waiting for the train/bus to arrive.
Hibel: As the leading job board for Higher Education, we like to keep our customers, both job seekers and recruiters up to speed on what is next in their careers and career transitions. What is coming down the pike in terms of utilizing technology for job searching and recruiting?
Klau: I have no clue. I look at my career from when I graduated college (1993) and law school (1996), and look at the tools that have helped me the most – e-mail and my blog. Today, I see Twitter and LinkedIn adding value to how others find me/discover more info about me, so I think they add value as well. Beyond that, I’m sure we’ll see interesting applications develop for Google Wave for job seekers (and for recruiters looking for applicants), but I think those are probably a bit down the road. My advice to people is to avoid trying to think too hard about what comes next – use what’s out there today, and try to play with new stuff as it arrives. I’m now toying with Foursquare a bit – as a parent of 3 I don’t exactly hit the bars and restaurants all that often, but I love the social nature of the app, coupled with the notion of it being a game. Fred Wilson’s note recently about how Foursquare is helping him network professional struck a chord for me – http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/10/a-couple-foursquare-anecdotes.html – I think we’ll see more of this in the future. Beyond that, I’ll go back to how I started the answer: I have no idea. 🙂
Hibel: We frequently ask our guests to offer their best advice to job seekers. In preparing for our discussion, I came across a commencement address7 you made to the Class of 2009 of your legal alma mater where you said “Looking back, it’s obvious to me that this is one lesson I’ve learned: if you think you know exactly where you’re going, you’re not far enough away.” This thought really speaks well to the idea that you need to allow your career to happen in the infinitely possible ways it can. Academia has had defined roles for centuries so sometimes it has hard not to imagine ourselves in one of those roles. For those of us who may not be comfortable with the full thought that we need to just enjoy the journey without knowing the exact destination, what do you suggest should be our own personal barometer to ensure we are headed in a good direction?
Klau: My barometer has always been quite simple: do I love what I do, and am I passionate about it? If the answer to both is yes, the outcome is inevitable: I’m more engaged, more productive, and I’m just generally better at what I do. When one or both answers is anything less than a full ‘yes’, it’s time to reevaluate what I’m doing. It’s quite possible that people can be fully engaged in a traditional role – that can be what they’re meant to be. But I think more often than not people let the role define them, and allow other expectations to dictate their path. And that for me is unacceptable – that’s a path towards mediocrity.
Hibel: On June 7, 2004 a blog article8 ran with the title “Rick Klau Knows a Hot Political Candidate” about how you started to help and blog for a candidate. 19 days later, that candidate, Illinois State Senator Barack Obama, made a speech to the Democratic National Convention and, as they say, the rest is history. We would ask that you apply the same amount of accuracy in your choice (please forward me your 2010 NCAA tournament picks as well) and ask you suggest how you feel how higher education can become more affordable in 2020 than it is in 2010?
Klau: You sure you don’t want me to just solve the health care crisis?
Hibel: If the genie is offering more than one wish… I’m an academicy sort of guy…
Klau: I think we’ll see an aggressive embrace among some institutions to use technology in new ways to mitigate rising costs. Video conferencing can put students and teachers in the same “room” from thousands of miles away. Internet access and a cheap laptop can give students access to more materials than have ever fit in a printed book. Some will use this to expand who can avail themselves of the education offered by the institution; others will use it to expose students on campus to a world beyond the campus. Both are effective, and will likely change the economics – but how/if that makes it more affordable, I don’t know. I certainly hope it does – as a parent of three young children, I think their collective undergraduate education today would cost over $1m. I can’t begin to imagine what it will cost by the time they’re actually in school (starting 9 years from now).