Hey, That Drunken Toga Party Only Happened Once (But a Potential Employer Doesn’t Know That)
Maybe it was a onetime doozy of a mistake, but job recruiters don’t know that. And according to Career Journal (via ComputerWorld, HT TechDirt), they’re looking you up:
JANUARY 17, 2006 - Unflattering personal information drifting around the Internet, known by some as “digital dirt,” can doom a job search before it even gets started. Job hunters should know that recruiters can, and often do, read much of what’s posted about them on the Web.
Christine Hirsch, president of Chicago Resources, a professional-services recruiting firm, says she regularly uses Google and other sites to check on candidates. In one instance, she found details about a candidate on a law school Web site describing disciplinary actions related to a fraternity prank involving public intoxication. The candidate, who had received a verbal offer (and who had disclosed a drunken-driving conviction in college), didn’t get the job after the new information surfaced.
According to a 2005 survey of 102 executive recruiters by ExecuNet, an executive job-search and networking organization, 75% of recruiters use search engines to uncover information about candidates, and 26% of recruiters have eliminated candidates because of information found online.
The article offers four main tips to help job seekers clean up their digital dirt:
- Google yourself to see what’s out there. If there’s untruth out there, try to get rid of it. If you can’t, be ready to bring it up proactively. You may have to put your name in quotes to cut down the number of results, and use variations of your name to make sure you catch them all.
- Clean up your profile and records on social-networking sites.
- Bury your dirt by putting so much recent and positive stuff out there that the good stuff shows up at the top of the search engines and the bad stuff is buried so deep no one will get to it.
- Monitor what is being said about you by subscribing to a site, like pubsub.com, which sends you an e-mail every time you’re mentioned newsgroups, blogs, and securities filings.
An additional suggestion: Set yourself up in Google Alerts for News, News and Web, and/or Groups to see what is being written and said about you.
I would suppose that these ideas will soon not be just for job seekers; they may become very relevant to people who want to keep their jobs, too.
Incidentally, most teachers and professors don’t yet realize this is also done by students and their parents. My students googled me on the first day and were thrilled by what they found - and it wasn’t even dirty. Just success in finding me was exciting. Imagine the reaction of a student who finds something juicy, or a parent who finds something objectionable.
Be aware, all!
Comment by Wulf — January 19, 2006 @ 8:53 pm
#1 — interesting.
It bugs me, and it doesn’t seem fair, that by the time our kids enter the workforce, you can have one bad day in a 20-year period and it can have a negative impact on maybe the rest of your life. And you’ll never be able to totally clean things up any more thanks to Google cache, Wayback Machine, etc.
Comment by TBlumer — January 19, 2006 @ 9:13 pm
Can you imagine how easy it will be to dig up dirt on aspiring politicians?
Comment by Kevin Irwin — January 19, 2006 @ 10:14 pm
#3, I think politicians are going to figure out pretty soon, maybe in as little as a year or so, that they need to do all the opposition research on themselves, and come clean on everything that anyone could conceivably find (preferably absolutely everything whether or not they think it will be found).
Then they’ll put have to put “my baggage” links on their home pages, so they can give their side of all the bad stuff that is out there, including the unconditional words that I long to hear: “I was wrong. I am sorry.”
Comment by TBlumer — January 19, 2006 @ 10:44 pm
People ask why I don’t have a blog…
Comment by Kevin Irwin — January 19, 2006 @ 11:01 pm
#5 that’s funny. Maybe it would have been a good idea to blog anonymously…. Too late now.
Comment by TBlumer — January 20, 2006 @ 12:09 am