Are recruiters using Technorati or other blog search tools to find talent? So says the Wall Street Journal in today's paper, pointing out how blogging used to be a screening tool (maybe you shouldn't have gone on that rant about your ex-girlfriend...) but has become, for many more mature members of the job pool, a gold mine. That "about me" page does have some use after all, and many blogs I've visited have a standard resume format where the ironic sideways self-portrait, list of favorite songs and stats on children and puppies usually go.

Who would hire from a blog, and what kind of people, exactly, might they hire? The WSJ uses Ryan Loken, a recruiter at Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT), as an example; he says he's hired about 125 people because of their blogs, but doesn't say in which departments.

You might expect graphic designers and web developers to be frequently hired because of their blogs and fun little "side" projects -- and they are, it's true, but don't decide to stick to anonymity on your blog just because you're not in a high-tech field. I'm in (variously) product development, parenting and financial writing, and photography, and all my interests have inspired the occasional recruiter contact to my personal blog address (but, for the record, I'm sticking with this job!). The companies they represented were ones you'd never think of: packaged goods, wireless phones, organic farms. I've found great candidates for contract writing positions in everything from scrapbooking to cooking to living a simpler life through the blogosphere, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Blogging is an invaluable way to showcase one's expertise in any area, from keeping chickens to CSS design to technical stock analysis, and it's becoming, more and more, the leading way to see and be seen. Networking clubs and who-you-know? Passé. It's about how well you SEO. And I could write a whole separate post on that...