I got started as a recruiting blogger going through newspaper employment sections. The advice that was given was so incredibly bad that I felt the need to call these syndicated columnists out on the carpet.
From interview weakness questions to negotiating salaries, columnist advice in newspapers is embarrassingly bad. It's the symptom of distance. Syndicated columnists don't look for jobs the same way that the people who read the employment section of the newspaper do. They're far removed from the actual, day-to-day employment process. And it shows.
I'm a long way from writing furious scribes on this topic here and at recruiting.com, and my choice of topic has moved from candidate-focused to business focused, but there are a lot of fresh and not so fresh voices in the recruiting blogosphere that day in and day out are providing fantastic advice to the average job-seeker.
I'm talking about people like Jason Alba and Chris Russell and Louise Fletcher, who regularly put out fantastic advice that peels back the problems of employment process and helps people get jobs.
As a community, the recruiting blogosphere is very fractured. Even in our social networks, niches are carved out and everyone fights for a little piece of the pie. This is normal in network development, as the amount of information available allows us to specialize, and that leads to fragmentation.
But it shouldn't stop us from working together. I think it's important we work to get voices from the recruiting blogosphere into the mainstream media. Our content is good, and those that have proven themselves deserve to have a wider audience. It's a win for the newspapers, who badly need original and fresh content, and it's a win for the blogosphere, which proves itself from than guys in their pajamas yelling at the New York Times.
So there it is. Anyone interested in helping me get some voices from our part of the Net to the people who need it most?
