Thanks for reading my blog and for your thoughtful comments.

Don’t you get a kick out of self-Googling? Purposefully building my online presence, I’m constantly surprised (sometimes excited) to see where my name and company/blog names pop up.

I’m curious, in your hiring manager role, how do you respond to personal branding in resumes — especially a stand-alone brand statement in executive resumes? I like to keep an eye and ear to the pipeline. It’s been working really well for my clients. Any thoughts?

Regards, Meg

Anyhow, you make a really good point about identity transparency. Once upon a time it was a lot easier to lie on a CV and bluff your way into a job; now, you can pretty much bet the farm that whatever hiring manager sees and likes your resume is going to be punching your name into a search engine.

But, as an occasional hiring manager myself I do think that the user-generated (or web 2.0) revolution is helping rather than hurting industry hiring. Since last year I’ve pretty much done all my hiring through either Linked In (business communication 2.0) or Dayak (recruiting 2.0), or both. I go to the latter, set my fees and the job specs, and as the recruiter-culled candidates come in I punch their stats into the former.

A few candidates have really made an impression on me with their web skills. One guy didn’t get the job right away but he kept me in his Linked In network and would send me pm’s whenever his blog updated. A couple months later I had a vacancy and rather than post the job to Dayak I just gave him a call. The lesson? If you don’t quite have the google results, rss works, too!