Jed Hallam

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Write for a reader, not a recruiter

I hope that you appreciate the irony in this post as it’s meant, because it is meant.

I’m sat on the train to London and East Midland Mainline don’t provide wi-fi or power points. And I’m sat in the quiet coach. None of these things really work with me, I’m no good without something to keep me occupied (interwebz), my phone is dying so I’m a bit angry and I can’t make any noise because I got in the wrong carriage and I have a weird ‘Final Destination’ thing about changing seats.

So, the only thing I can really do is read through what Feeddemon downloaded this morning (and catch up on the other 3k+ posts – it’s been batshit busy at Wolfstar recently). After skimming a few thousand titles something dawned a bit. We’re running out of things to write about. It’s official, there are now that many PR and social media bloggers that we’ve written everything. Well, I don’t quite think that that’s true, but that did lead me to something else…

In the beginning there was a core of about ten PR / social media bloggers, they gave everyone a leg up and got others started, then came the second wave, and on and on and on. Those original bloggers don’t write everyday, they don’t tend to link bait and they’re more concerned with contributing to an ongoing conversation than finding their next job because ‘they blog, so they must ‘get’ this social networks thingy everyone’s talking about’. They write for their readers and their industry, not for their CV.

It’s not a bad thing that your blog or ‘presence’ can bring you attention, but you’re playing around in the airing cupboard rather than in the garden. And who ever pays you the attention will eventually find you out and expose you!

Jed’s ironic moral: write for a reader, not a recruiter.

  • Haha oh my gosh do I ever agree with you on this one. Cringy grad-blogs that might aswell be screaming FOR THE LOVE OF GOD EMPLOY ME seemed to spring up all over the place about this time last year. Saying that, I do feel for graduates who can no longer wow their potential employers with a bit of guff about being a digital native, and I bet much less in the way of twitter-recruitment goes on now its more of a celebrity circle jerk than a PR one. Not sure what's worse, maybe PRs who think they're celebrities ;)
  • Well done. Your post is very interesting as it makes me feel like I'm in the coach with you trying to keep quiet myself. Thank you for an interesting read and a visually rewarding one at that.
  • Slightly warbling post on why you should write for a reader, not a recruiter – http://bit.ly/2svAO


    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

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