Career advice is so ubiquitous and free on the Internet that it has virtually lost its value. Inexperienced "experts" regurgitate drivel and platitudes that can be found in myriad career books. Opportunistic Web sites go so far as to totally contradict their own message with nary a qualm. After all, it's all about getting more eyeballs and selling advertising. In today's job market, brazen opportunists in the career space make money delivering questionable advice to desperate consumers.

The attention spans of desperate job hunters are short. Many people will drop into a Web site, read a sound-bite of an article, and move on. They don't have time to test the site's integrity.

So I got really bugged when one of my readers recently pointed out a powerful--I think fatal--contradiction within one of the hottest Gen Y career sites--The Brazen Careerist.

Let's take a look at the Web site itself and at what The Brazen Careerist purports to be:

"Brazen Careerist is a career management tool for next-generation professionals."

So far, so good. Gen Y can use good advice. Now let's look at the Web site's founder's comments:

"Everything you do becomes an important part of who you are... Never before has instant access to personal information been a good thing. But, when it comes to our careers, why shouldn't it be? So many social networks leave us wondering what people are going to dig up. Take control of what people see by being a part of a social network that you'll want your professional connections to see."

Good advice, but hardly new or unusual. (Pam Dixon's World Privacy Forum does a better job teaching you more about protecting your identity and reputation online.)

The Web site goes on to caution job hunters about the significance of their online reputations:

"Hiring managers know how easy it is to find personal information about job candidates online. So it's more important now than ever before to be conscious of your online identity. Brazen Careerist helps you create a social feed around your expertise, career self-exploration, passions and views on the workplace. We may not be able to erase our past, but we can control our present."

Any good career counselor or resume writer warns that what you say online contributes to your reputation because you are searchable. So be careful because "we may not be able to erase our past."

Now we cut to Penelope Trunk, the founder of Brazen Careerist. Trunk's personal life is none of my business, nor am I interested in it. Most employers don't want to be bothered with your personal life either, unless it affects their business. But if you create an online reputation that conflicts with their theirs--or that puts their company in a bad light by association--it won't matter whether you're Gen X, Gen Y or genuinely sorry.

Because I work in the career space, I care about the contradiction between the behavior of the "voice" of The Brazen Careerist and what the Web site purports to be to its users: A guiding light for Gen Y job hunters.

So, let's say you're a job hunter trying to learn from The Brazen Careerist "to be conscious of your online identity" and to "take control of what people see" of you. Or, you're a manager trying to fill a position and you've looked up a Gen Y job applicant online. Maybe you looked up Penelope Trunk. My first finds were on Twitter, in Penelope Trunk's tweets:

"In court against my landlord. I picked a conservative, tough-girl dress but I forgot a bra. So now my clothes strategy is prominent nipples."

"Getting a Brazilian. The woman waxing says she never sees people endure pain as well as I do: Another skill with no path to monetization."

"The farmer wants a trade. He'll do a favor for me if I wear a teddy to bed. I agree and ask him to create a profile at brazencareerist.com."

"I'm in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there's a fucked-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin."

(Some of those tweets go back a month or two, but time becomes suspended when an employer does an online search on a job applicant. It's all now. Try explaining to an employer that what you posted three months ago is so yesterday in Web time and doesn't really mean anything...)

The Brazen Careerist cites Gen Y personal branding expert Dan Schwabel: "While you create your brand, ensure that the content, including pictures and text, are concise, compelling and consistent with how you want to represent yourself."

Building a successful personal brand can be done in a number of ways. One way is to be outrageous and to cultivate a brazen or rakish reputation that attracts attention. Another is to build integrity, or as Schwabel astutely puts it, a brand consistent with how you want to represent yourself.

By choice, Penelope Trunk and The Brazen Careerist share a brand. That brand purports to understand and define Gen Y. In fact, Trunk gets paid a lot of money to "explain" Gen Y to employers. Which version of Gen Y is The Brazen Careerist selling: The Web site or its founder?

Does Trunk's rakish reputation online serve to make The Brazen Careerist more popular? Probably. Does The Brazen Careerist care that Trunk violates the tenets of online reputation development espoused by the Web site? Probably not.

I do. And you should. Because there is no integrity when a thing behaves differently from the way it defines itself. Try behaving online like the face of The Brazen Careerist does and ask an employer to hire you.

So who's the brazen opportunist--The Brazen Careerist, or Penelope Trunk? Is there a difference? The point is, integrity isn't part of The Brazen Careerist package you get when you sign up.

Gen Y has some good voices speaking for it. It has some good role models. Of course, every generation is gullible to a point. But I don't think Gen Y is as stupid as Penelope Trunk thinks it is.

Nick Corcodilos is the author of How Can I Change Careers? He also writes the free weekly Ask The Headhunter Newsletter. Ask The Headhunter is a registered trademark.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/drstarbuck/ / CC BY 2.0