Her company, Blue Sky Resumes, is a real  leader in creative resume development and job search strategies. They write creative resumes for professionals at all levels. They also develop additional career marketing materials such as cover letters and bios. Blue Sky Resumes is one of the first resume writing companies to offer online portfolios as an additional personal marketing tool.

Here's Louise:

While following (and engaging in) the recent debate regarding the use of My Space pages for hiring and screening, I came across Astha’s “Evolving Ideas” blog. She writes:

“Ironically [...] one wouldhave thought that the potential anonymity would have spawned limitless pretense and posturing on the virtual web—but surprisingly it’s actually fostered honesty and dropping of masks (otherwise the whole myspace-recruitment debate wouldn’t be happening). It would seem given a choice people would like to be who they are—the real world just doesn’t give them that much of a choice!”

She’s right. People are putting more and more information out into cyberspace, and the younger they are, the more they’re doing it.

To me, this new culture of open communication has huge implications for hiring and HR management. The past was all about spin. Job seekers wrote resumes that showed them in their best light, dressed up in their best suit and presented the best possible version of themselves in interviews. And once they were hired, they chose what to reveal to their employers about their backgrounds, lifestyles and personal interests.

But sites like My Space (link: http://www.myspace.com/) and Xanga (link: http://www.xanga.com) combined with personal blogs and del.icio.us (link: http://del.icio.us/) (and probably lots of other cool technologies I’m too old to know about) are encouraging people to reveal more and more of themselves online.

The impact on selection has been widely discussed (would you rule out a potential employee because you read about his wild drinking online? Or because you found out he is a member of an unusual religion or a fringe political group?) but less has been said about the implications for HR. If we do rule out potential employees because of the things they wrote online, are we going to start researching current employees?

• What do you do if a manager wants to terminate an employee because of something he read on that person’s My Space page? “I wouldn’t allow it” you say ... but what if it was really egregious. What if it was the worst thing you could imagine?
   
• How do you prevent managers from discriminating based on information they found online (when you don’t even know they read anything online).
   
• How do you prove that your decision not to hire Joe for the analyst position wasn’t based on his ethnic background when you can no longer claim ignorance just because he didn’t put a picture on his resume?

I was never one of those HR people who fixated on legal risks, and that’s not what this is about. I’m just saying that we are undergoing a seismic shift in society that will have ramifications on all of our hiring practices and HR processes.

When the My Space kids move into executive positions, they'll have this all figured out, but in the meantime a generation of people raised on newspaper ads, resumes and interviews is meeting a generation raised on complete transparency.

Can you say generation gap?

john at johnsumser.com . - .  Permalink . - . Today's Bugler