Monday, 28 May 2007

LinkedIn And The New Transparent World Of Bio Creation

Four times now, someone I know has sent me someone else's linkedin profile (or blog profile) and said, "hey, didn't you do that?" "wasn't that your title?" "look what so-and-so says they did".

As we all are getting fabulously up to speed with the new transparency, old habits are dying hard and dying very publicly. If it was even acceptable in the first place, now it's completely dangerous to exaggerate anything on your resume that you can not fully and completely take ownership of.

One person who emailed me actually was really pissed off on my behalf and couldn't understand why I wasn't all that much. I just figure, people who should know do, and people who don't know will figure it out once they hire the person.

Besides, half the time I think people THINK they created stuff because great collaborative environments make it such that everyone takes ownership over projects and by the end, no one is really sure who did what. So I take it as a compliment as a Sr. manager.

Net net, it's more important than ever to ask yourself the hard questions as you build out your profiles online. They are public, everyone can see them and anyone can also scrutinize them. If you have misrepresented the truth, everyone will also know.

Transparency isn't only for brands now, it's for you and me and our bios too.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey - that's a fantastic point - transparency works both ways, and can be a double edged sword, if you aren't mindful of all the implications :-)

 
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