My thoughts on this "Do You Have Klout? Employers Want To Know"

So Wired, Forbes and well everyone is talking about this article. Basically A guy applied for a job as a VP at a large marketing firm and got passed over because his Klout score was a 34. They hired someone with a 67.

Well that's how the story spins it, but the piece everyone seems to be forgetting is when they asked about his klout score, the guy had no idea what klout was. Now clearly not everyone follows the social media space that closely and there are a lot of sites that measure your social media influence, klout.com, peerindex.com, kred.com and those are the ones that are top of mind for me. If I looked I bet I could find another dozen easily.

Klout though is the biggest one and for a VP of marketing to not be aware of it, seems like a big miss. Maybe he has 15 years of experience, but if it was traditional print marketing and they are looking for a social marketing expert, I can see why they passed. He didn't sound like a good fit.

Now I'm not in marketing, I'm an IT guy, but if I was asked the klout question, my answer would be different.

"Well my klout score is currently 42, and while that's not as high a score as I think I deserve, the reason it is lower than I think is because klout currently only ranks, facebook, twitter and google plus. I spend a lot of time on linkedin which I think has more business relevance than facebook. In fact according to a recent study by hubspot linkedin is 4X more effective than twitter and 7x more effective than facebook on visit to lead conversions. I think when linkedin.com influence is included I would be more comparable to a mid 50"

That shows I understand how klout works, what it is, and can speak intelligently on why I like it and don't like it. Now maybe they still want someone who is a social medial rockstar with a score to match, or maybe they disagree that linkedin.com is a valid way to do business, or maybe they just want someone who tweets way more than I do.

Either way I think that's a better answer than "I don't know what klout is". Even if I didn't know what klout was, I would have asked a lot of questions on why they think it is relevant and how it compared to other scoring systems.

In summary I think the reason the guy wasn't hired was his lack of knowledge on social media and now really the fact that his klout score was lower. My opinion of course since I wasn't there...