Comments on: Branding Yourself on the Web: Control the Message Before It Controls You

By: Easy On Me

Easy On Me — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:56:43 +0000

@JoJo: I went your daughter’s route. My upbringing led me to rebel just like your daughter. I hated the hypocrisy of being treated one way at home and another in public. I endeavored to fuse the public and private faces and have, modulo a few obvious things like keeping personal data to myself so identity thieves can’t get to it.

Ironically I married someone who likes the JoJo’s Dad approach, sigh…

Cheers,

Tom Campbell

By: JoJo

JoJo — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 12:42:36 +0000

When I was young, my father told me that I must have two faces; a public and a private face. The public face is to carefully controlled and manipulated to my advantage, whereas the other is never to be revealed except to those I’d have absolute trust in (basically nobody). In the fifty odd years I’ve walked the earth, I’ve found this advice to be invaluable and has saved me much grief (and expense). I offered this same wisdom to my daughter who soundly rejected it, and is now living her life as an open book (she’s twenty now and has no problem documenting every private detail of her life via Facebook). It will be interesting (and probably provide me with much future entertainment) to see how this works out for her.

By: Easy On Me

Easy On Me — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:49:52 +0000

@Jurgen, I can’t add anything to your post. Bravo! I do need to discuss the necessity of failure later.

By: Jurgen Fritz

Jurgen Fritz — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:00:05 +0000

You make it sound that hiring is a methodical process, that all companies follow a very rigid process and employees who don’t follow it have only themselves to blame if they don’t get the job.

Well, from one hiring manager to another, let me tell you that hiring in many places is an absolute mess. This includes those Internet powerhouses that proclaim to “hire only the best and brightest.” The reality is that the candidate controls very little of the hiring process.

If you were to study how hiring is done at many companies, large and small, it is extremely chaotic. The people who already have a job inside the company many times do NOT care about the applicants. Unless the hiring manager himself is someone who has lost out on a job he knew he was willing and capable of doing, it’s no big deal if he lets candidate after candidate slip by. He can simply say to his boss, “They don’t make them like they used to” and never be challenged on it. (How can you see 80 people and say none of them are qualified?)

Now, to the heart of this reply. Like many things in life my 2-word answer to your scenario is, IT DEPENDS! You present this case of 2 candidates who show up, one with a stellar background and another with some Facebook page that says some otherwise objectionable thing about beer and bongs. Who would I choose? It depends.

I’ve been in hiring situations where I extended an offer precisely to the one that most other employers would write off. Why? Because I saw several other valuable attributes. Hiring superstars comes with its own set of nightmares as explained by the founder of Friendster. Additionally, I’ve had situations where I specifically chose someone who wanted more than anything to change his life, prove himself and overall had a better attitude than arrogant 4.0GPA jackasses.

Moreover, that person got along far better with the staff. Why? Because he had real-life experience in prospering after setbacks. If you like most American employers want to play it safe, you can keep your allegedly clean candidates, who are really making a game of masquerading as it is.

As John Fuhrman put it, “Reject me! I love it!”