Rafe Colburn's warning to bloggers, Your Permanent Record, spooked me a bit.
...when I'm involved with hiring people...I can find out more...from their blog archives than I can by interviewing them. In interviews, people usually tell the interviewer what they think they want to hear. In other contexts, they are usually less circumspect. When I find I may work with someone, I look for blog posts, messages to mailing lists, comments on blogs, Usenet rants from a decade ago, and anything else I can find. There's more to anyone than their persona on the Internet, but more information is almost always better than less.
Now, I try to be circumspect, but I'm well aware that there are other Rebecca Claytons who are Not Me. At one time, a search for my name on Google returned first an irritating young artist in Oxford who wrote tediously of her favorite drinks at the local coffee shop. She was particularly Not Me. But how can the snoopy prospective employer tell the difference?
These Rebecca Claytons are not me.
- Rebecca Clayton. An Arizona artist, specializing in oil paintings with Western themes.
- Rebecca Clayton of University College London. A young neurobiologist.
- Rebecca Clayton of Penn Law School. A law professor.
- Rebecca Clayton Caudle's Churn. An antique churn with provenance. When I first tried to get Google to index my Web pages, my goal was to someday rank higher in search results than this churn. It took about a year. The tipping factor was starting a weblog using Google's product, Blogger.
- Rebecca Clayton, second grade teacher in Norfolk, VA.
These links (and this blog) are me.
- TAMS article.
- Microbial Genome sequencing at The Institute for Genomic Research. Most of these "R. Clayton" search results are me.
- My Web pages.
2 comments:
But none of the others have a blog, I take it. So they probably each resent you far more than you would ever have occasion to resent them.
There's some poor guy with the same name as me trying to run a solar store up in Vermont. I guess if I become a big enough business liability for him, I could offer to change my name -- for a price, of course.
The other Rebeccas seem more respectable than me, and most are younger....even the Arizona painter is successful and well-regarded. Perhaps I'll be the red herring in their future careers.
Thanks for putting it in this light for me, Dave. I can always count on you!
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