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Elizabeth Garone
If Irish poet Brendan Behan were still alive today, he might want to amend his
oft-quoted words, There s no such thing as bad publicity, except your own
obituary.
These days, he d surely need to add inappropriate Facebook posts immediately
after obituary . With the explosion of social media, job seekers are
unintentionally showing their true colours more than ever. In some cases they
are suffering very real consequences, such as being taken out of the running
for a job or even losing an offer after it s been extended.
Ninety-three percent of hiring managers said that they are likely to look at
candidates social profiles during the recruiting process, according to Jobvite
s 2013 Social Recruiting Survey, which included 1,200 managers globally.
Nearly 39% of US-based employers use social networking sites to research job
candidates and 43% of them said that they have found information that factored
into their decision not to hire a candidate, according to a 2013 survey by
global job site CareerBuilder.com.
Manage Your Reputation
It s important to manage how you appear online. Five steps to take:
1. Create content. Promote your expertise by starting your own blog, guest
blogging for others and posting comments on LinkedIn groups.
2. Set up Google authorship. Link your Google Plus account (if you don t have
one, set one up), to your online posts. This helps protect what you write and
share as your own.
3. Set up Google alerts. Make sure to check the box for all results and not
just only the best results to ensure that everything with your name will be
monitored and reported to you.
4. Create your profiles wisely. You need a strong presence on LinkedIn, so take
the time to create a complete profile with your brand presence.
5. Actively manage the web of you. Monitor your online presence at all times.
This might require paying a small amount for a reputation management tool.
Three tools that can help you do this are Brandyourself.com (free basic
membership), Vizibility.com (free basic membership) and Reputation.com (fee).
Source: Peter Sterlacci
But just as keeping our professional and personal lives separate has become
more important, we re finding that maintaining that distinction has become more
difficult. So, what should you do if you Google your own name and come up with
unsavoury results?
Measure your online value
It s critical to understand how you appear online but most people don t,
according to Peter Sterlacci, a personal branding consultant who is based in
Kyoto, Japan. Unfortunately, most people are reactive rather than proactive
when it comes to managing their online reputation, he wrote in an email.
Until something negative appears, we don't really think about our online
identity, and then it is too late.
An easy and free way to check your online identity is with a tool like the
Online Identity Calculator (www.onlineidcalculator.com), suggested Sterlacci.
You answer a few questions based on a Google search of your name, and the
calculator categorises your identity in one of five ways, anything from
digitally disguised to digitally distinct.
Go straight to the source
Google and other search engines rank online content on its quality, the number
of links pointing back to it, the keywords used and how recent or fresh it is,
said Dan Schawbel, author of Promote Yourself: The New Rules of Career Success.
That means that the more social media you use, the more careful you have to be
about what employers will see.
Employers will search for your name, and results will populate based on what
you have published about yourself or what other people have published about
you, he said.
First, find the source. If it isn t obvious from the link, one way to find out
is to visit http://whois.net and see who owns the website. Then ask that person
to delete the tweet, article or photo, said Schawbel. Be prepared: making the
bad news go away isn t always that easy. You might have to live with what s
found and try to counteract it instead. Try and get positive press in the
media to counter it, write articles and blog posts, or register your name on
more social networking sites, said Schawbel.
If you aren t well known, then work on becoming better known so that you can be
found online. Do this by posting career-relevant content on LinkedIn, asking
for recommendations, giving people endorsements and participating in groups,
suggested Schawbel.
Create an online body of work that now represents you, Ted Clohosey, branding
expert and co-founder of United Kingdom and Ireland-based Your Brand Academy,
wrote in an email.
Cast a wide net
Next, work on building up your online brand by setting up social media profiles
on sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and About.me.
Your brand is your business, so create a Facebook page as if you were a
business and put up posts that interest you professionally, wrote Clohosey.
Google is looking continuously for fresh new content. If someone searches for
your name, having fresh content [and] always demonstrating your value will
showcase you in the best light.
Clohosey also suggested creating an account with a service such as
Slideshare.com, which allows you to share PowerPoint presentations. These can
visually demonstrate your knowledge and expertise. Also, start a blog and post
daily to further build your online value repertoire, all the while building a
body of evidence of how you create and add value, he wrote. This will help
create an amazing first impression of you online. [And it will] promote your
value whilst pushing the negative things further down [in] Google. First
impressions count.
Clohosey recommended using a social media management tool, such as HootSuite,
to post your updates to all of your social media platforms simultaneously.
To divulge or not to divulge
If you find something negative and you can t get it removed, should you get in
front of a potential problem and tell a would-be or current employer? Only if
you re dealing with false accusations and you can prove it, Schawbel
recommends.
In that case, you can tell them your case and show the evidence so they don't
hold it against you, he said. Otherwise, they will take those results as face
value and not hire you.
Lisa LaRue, a London-based career coach and owner of career development
consultancy CareerWorx, recommended against sharing negative information. In
my experience, employers and recruiters will have reviewed your online
[profile] before interviewing you so it would only be worth addressing it if it
was specifically brought up, she wrote in an email.
Instead, put your time into managing your online reputation via social media.
For example, spend time reviewing and adjusting your privacy settings,
suggested LaRue. Set online profiles so that they cannot be searched for by
your name, and turn off tagging so that friends can t tag photos of you that
might be publicly visible, according to LaRue.
Case by case
Of course, sometimes attempting to bury your past can backfire, according to
Clohosey. People [hire] people they know, like and trust, he wrote. A hiring
manager would much prefer to be told of any indiscretions rather than
discovering them.
Before you spend countless hours trying to erase every trace of your online
indiscretions, remind yourself that your comments about your ex-partner may not
be so bad.
Ask someone of managerial experience to judge the online evidence because very
often, our own ego is our worst enemy, and most likely the negative things are
not as bad as we think, wrote Clohosey.