We’ve learned that blogging might get you fired. Now it might make you unemployed as well.

Job seekers who are also bloggers may have a tough road ahead, if our committee's experience is any indication.

Ivan Tribble expresses his concerns about job seekers’ blogs. In today’s job market, the search committee not only looks through candidates’ resumes but also has a look at their online activity. Unfortunately, the search committee Ivan served then was turned down by some candidates’ blogs though they looked great on paper. In the miserable examples suggested by Ivan, it seems like the more self-disclosure job seekers make on the Net, the more vulnerable they are getting and the easier to lose a job they should have got. What role does one’s blog play in job hunting? A bonus stage of which a job seeker can take advantage to outnumber other competitors? Or a backdoor through which the potential boss will look and find out this is totally a jerk?

Ivan was right to claim that the search committee’s initial thoughts about blogs were positive. But what did they expect of those would-be faculty members’ blogs indeed? A new venue into which “creative academics carrying their scholarly activity outside the classroom and the narrow audience of print publications.” The anticipation is understandable since that’s what some scholars are doing. However, Ivan classifies the following use of blogs as “examples of the worst kinds of uses”:

A blog easily becomes a therapeutic outlet, a place to vent petty gripes and frustrations stemming from congested traffic, rude sales clerks, or unpleasant national news. It becomes an open diary or confessional booth, where inward thoughts are publicly aired.

Sounds familar,huh? Ironically, that’s what most bloggers are doing, more or less. I might be wrong but just fail to see anything wrong with it. Can you? As long as bloggers would like to write about these things and take responsibility of what they’ve written, why bother to blame them for being so personal and “unprofessional?” I can control what I blog about but I have no power over how my readers think of that and how they judge me from those words. We can’t please everybody, that’s it.

Another thing that drew my attention is the search committee’s worries about the fact of the blog itself.

Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.

Gee! I just can’t help laughing at this and bursting into tears. Why doesn’t the committee cut off all the Internet connection for it might be abused by some big mouth staff? Or they should hire someone who can neither speak nor write so s/he can keep the “dirty laundry” secrets forever.