Are you Facebooked? Is your face on MySpace? What about LinkedIn? Do you tweet? Have you posted a comment on a company’s website or news page? Is your online CV up to date – do you even know where it is?
The chances are that even if you’re not a regular blogger or social networker, it’ll be still possible to find something about you on the web. And if you’re looking for a new job, what’s found could make the difference between an offer and a rejection: it’s estimated that over a quarter of HR professionals have rejected an applicant on the basis of what appears on the web.
Google yourself and see what comes up. With an estimated 60% of employers doing just that, you’ll get a feel for what they may learn about you.
In this guide we look at how to manage your internet reputation – your netrep – effectively.
1 Why your netrep is important
Netreps are all about perception, which is never more important than when you’re trying to create the right one. Whatever your name throws up on Google, be it about you or a doppelganger, will give an instant picture of your wider personality and interests. Information stays on the web for a long time, and negative publicity generally can’t be deleted from the search engines either. So, when you publish that video of you downing pints and start blogging about how you hate your job, think about the impact that might have – your employer, or next employer, is only a few clicks away.
It’s probably worth deciding if you want a netrep in the first place. If you decide to build a netrep that works to your advantage, consider what you’d like your name to be connected to. What impression of yourself you want to project. Then spend as much time managing your online reputation as you would on crafting your CV. If it all sounds like too much hassle and you’d just prefer to stay firmly offline, remember to close down your accounts from Facebook to Flickr before forsaking the online world.
2 Employers do look and make decisions
Whether or not an employer actively uses social media as part of their recruitment process, you can be pretty certain that you’ve been checked out online. With the current appetite for wearing our hearts on our electronic sleeves it’s not surprising that when you join an organisation your new colleagues will know much more about you already than you might be comfortable with.
Professional networks like LinkedIn and Xing should pose little problem – assuming your details are backed up by your CV and the “real” you. Your Bebo, Facebook and YouTube activity may give an employer a very different picture and there’s not much you can do once the impression is made. Employers do run some risk in vetting potential recruits via their online footprint, but as long as the decisions they make are not based on any legally discriminatory grounds – age, sex, religion and the like – then you’re going to have a tough job proving that your ill-considered remarks or pictures contributed to the nicely worded rejection letter.
And it’s not just potential employers who are checking you out. It’s highly likely that your current boss and colleagues will have done so too. And clients you are dealing with. Now, are you still sitting comfortably?
3 Dealing with bad netreps
Unlike tattoos, comments you’ve made online in the heat of the moment or that picture of you dancing on the bar on holiday can be cleaned up to improve your netrep. Some professional sites such as LinkedIn and Xing will let you remove comments or edit your profile accordingly – Facebook will let you remove comments you’ve made. Forums or blogs where you might have complained about customer service, for example, may not. It is often harder to remove pictures and video in which you’ve been tagged – contact the person who posted it and ask them to un-tag you or, better still, remove it altogether.
For those comments you are not able to do anything about, don’t worry, time is a great healer. The longer a web page has little or no activity, the lower down the search results it will go so older comments about less topical items will have less of an impact. Post worthwhile questions or add sensible and considered comment to discussions on your own or other people’s blogs and professional discussion groups. You’ll not only position yourself better professionally when you do come up in a search, but also push more of the outdated poorer content further down the search results. If all else fails hire an expert who will clean up your profile for a fee.