I sought some advice yesterday on strategies for my job search. In the course of the counseling session it was strongly recommended I remove the links to my blog and homepage from my resume. I was told that they would be perceived by many firms to demonstrate "a lack of judgment."
It was explained that law firms want cookie-cutter candidates who will fit into the firm indistinctively and march lockstep. They don't want to risk hiring someone who may be different. So here I thought that the blog helped differentiate me from the crowd, and now I learn that yes, yes it does, but that's apparently not a good thing.
I recognize that many blogs out there are full of asinine self-absorbed sub-literate drivel, and this may be what the firms fear when they hear of a blog. But, if I may be so bold to say, mine clearly isn't, and anyone who takes a moment to read it can immediately tell. The automatic suspicion a firm might have about me because I have publicly - and proudly - expressed myself is as irrationally based as, well, evaluating my entire potential worth as a lawyer based on arbitrary grades from a couple hours' worth of otherwise inconsequential exams. Or, to explain the dysfunction by another analogy, to automatically disqualify the first grader who cried on his first day of school for any eventual college financing on the assumption he's never going to be up to the scholarship required. It's pre-emptive, it's presumptive, it's superficial, it's wrong.
With the blog I've been regularly writing and publishing on substantive topics for almost a year and a half. I would have thought such effort would be seen as a tremendous asset, suggesting that I take the craft of writing seriously, that I have a sense of commitment and follow-through, and that I'm trying to develop more sophisticated thinking on legal issues, among other positive things. I would have thought these attributes to be good ones for a lawyer to have. But, then again, what do I know - I'm still a layman.
So now I get to decide what to do. At first it seems there is a simple solution, to just take the blog reference off the resume while surreptitiously continuing to blog anyway. But such a course of action is hardly innocuous. True, on a resume it's all about image and how you present yourself. It's clearly not the time for the thorough abject candor about yourself you'd share with your best friend. But what's also true about resumes is that truth is important, and suppressing the blog, something that has become so entwined with my identity as a person and a developing legal professional, something I'm more proud of than almost anything else I've done, seems like a lie, a lie I'd be telling just to get a firm to like me. It's like an afterschool special gone horribly awry, where the sage advice in fact turns out to be to wear the same clothes the popular girls wear so you can be part of their clique. That kind of conformity isn't right for 11 year olds, and it's not right for me.
Meanwhile the tacit message seems to be that according to Big Firms I should somehow be ashamed of what I've expressed, and I find this disturbing and anathema to any values I'd hoped to develop when I chose to pursue this field. The counselor said that in the end it was up to me, that I can choose to do things more conventionally, or I can do things my way and proudly fly my blog banner if that's really what I felt was important, which I do. But I'd need to understand that it shrinks my universe of possibilities of potential firms to work for. Still, my gut feeling is that any firm inclined to reject me as a candidate out of hand because I have a blog is not the kind of firm that would be a fit for me. Unfortunately that may be all of them.