But if someone has it, you're likely to take it into account. So as a candidate it's useful.
But... of course I look beyond the resume that the candidate has sent me. Which means that, as a candidate, a relatively easy way to stand out is to have a small amount of public creativity on display for hiring managers to spot.
Sometimes a candidate might interview poorly because they get nervous... but there's clear evidence out there of their skills and experience which can help guide a second round of interviews that help avoid missing out on great talent.
Let's say I have 10 resumes, and I only want to dedicate phone screens to 5 of them and in-person interviews to 2 or 3 (because my time is finite).
If you have some public writing or public code, you are much likely to make it to the phone screen stage.
If you're confident that your resume speaks for itself already, you are free to ignore my advice.
I had assumed that most other hiring managers are affected by this factor in a similar way to me, but maybe I'm wrong about that.
Is there a signal which suggests that "public creativity" equals "good engineer", particularly when the resume already speaks for itself? Or is it purely to compensate, as you suggest, for a possibly poor interview performance?
I'm honestly skeptical that such a signal exists (but can be convinced otherwise), except insofar that a person may be invited to give talks _because_ they have demonstrated strong engineering skills or talent -- whereupon, yet again, their resume should speak for itself.
I do believe that candidates with public creativity are more likely to make for a promising interview. Thinking back, I can't remember many cases where a candidate with some evidence of public creativity bombed the interview completely.
IE, unless the role is explicitly "go be the face of the company and smile on youtube and praise our products and their awesomeness", no one cares about your github resume since they've barely looked at your resume before the interview. Just try and demonstrate you know what you're talking about during the interview and can relate some real world experiences in a sane manner, and you're halfway there.
My employer once hired someone into a leadership role who we all knew from conferences and press coverage. We were pretty excited to land such a high-profile guy.
Turned out, he spent most of his time prepping and going to conferences, and working on his press coverage. Very little actual work got done, and we quietly parted ways with him in less than a year.
In retrospect, it’s a bit of a “well duh” moment, connecting the dots. But at the time, we all just assumed that there must be incredible substance for him to have such a high profile.
I took a big lesson from that: people who are good at building an audience would be a great hire if you need to build an audience. If you need something else, don’t assume the audience (or conference organizers, or reporters) have actually vetted that person for the skills you need. They probably didn’t.
Ultimately, he ended up as an executive at another company, with responsibility for raising their profile and finding new clients. His skills and inclinations are perfect for that.
Obviously there is a market for these people to exist and for companies who want to pseudo acquire their audience.
I wonder what the total number of these folks are in our industry and worldwide…