Do you have digital dirt? If so, it might be time to start cleaning it up. Your on-line Web pages could cost you a chance at a job.
Digital dirt is the information about you - your hobbies, your photos, your rants and raves - that's available on the Internet through personal Web sites, profiles on popular social-networking sites, and comments on blogs. What you might not realize is that employers are reading what's out there and in many cases these things can derail your job prospects even before you're called for an interview.
According to Tory Johnson, a recruiter who recently published an article on this topic for ABC News, this all started with Google. The popular search engine enabled all of us to become private eyes. We can look up anyone and anything on the Internet with the simple click of the mouse. “This is a great tool for job-seekers,” Johnson said. “They can Google an interviewer to learn something about that person in hopes of using it to establish a rapport during the interview.
“But there's a flip side," Johnson says. "Those same employers check out prospective hires. With basic on-line searches, they're finding risqué photos posted on personal Web sites and social networks. They're reading brags about excessive drinking and promiscuity, and plenty more.”
With the high costs of recruiting, training and retaining top talent - from entry level to senior executives - employers must be cautious about who they hire. As a recruiter, Tory Johnson says, “If I'm considering two college seniors for the same position and I come across an on-line profile for one of them that brags about rowdy parties and drunken escapades, I might think twice about that person. And I will likely lean more toward the candidate who has a clean on-line profile - or none at all.”Several college career service offices have begun aggressively warning students that recruiters monitor what they post on-line. In a competitive job market, students need all the ammunition they can get. And a heads-up on this growing trend has allowed many students to start pre-emptively dusting their own dirt.
(Incidentally, many college admissions offices now review the on-line profiles of high school seniors when determining their eligibility for admittance. Ask your son and daughter if they would want to miss out on the college of their dreams because they're boasting about skipping class and underage drinking.)
Not Limited to the College Crowd
All of us - regardless of age or position - are subject to on-line searches by current and prospective employers. Many companies that have ruled out candidates - and even rescinded offers - because of what they found on-line.
Digital dirt included misstated academic qualifications, radical political views, objectionable jokes posted on personal Web pages and even negative comments about former employers submitted to blogs.
Narcisurf Today
Johnson advises that you do some narcisurfing! It's a term that's cropping up relating to Internet searches that we conduct on ourselves. Not only can you Google yourself, but you should go to dogpile.com, too. Dogpile retrieves information from multiple search engines and gives different results than Google or Yahoo! does.
Johnson gives this advice: “If you have an on-line profile on any of the social networks, carefully review its contents to see if there's anything that would make an employer wince. If there's information on your personal Web page that you wouldn't want your current or future boss to see, then change it. If the objectionable information about you is on another site, you can contact the webmaster about having it changed or removed. And if that's not possible, you'll have to be ready to explain it if asked.”
Consider Professional, Not Social Networks
Johnson further advises, since there are indeed great advantages to on-line networks - including promoting your professional strengths and personal interests as well as connecting with like-minded people, consider creating a free account on a site like LinkedIn. Unlike the social networks like MySpace, Facebook and Friendster, this service, which has 5 million registered users, focuses much more on the professional than the personal.
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