Career Advice: Be Careful What You Publish on the Internet
For the past few years, I have been warning jobseekers to be careful about what they post to Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms. This is because many professional recruiters and employers routinely scour social media sites and conduct Google searches on job applicants and to vet prospective new hires. There is nothing more likely to kill a job offer than a photo of a drunken job candidate holding a bottle of Jagermeister or one that depicts a candidate in lingerie or a compromising sexual position. Unfortunately, information posted to the Web has a tendency to exist into perpetuity whether you want it to or not! In other words, once it is published it may not be possible to remove or retrieve the offending material.
While the inability to erase one’s digital past was once mainly a problem of younger and college age persons, the growing use of social media by older individuals has catapulted the problem into the mainstream. Many older adults and celebrities involved in divorces, lawsuits and sensitive business transactions are increasingly finding it difficult to escape their digital past unscathed.
It is possible for those who are haunted by unflattering tags in Facebook photos or ill-advised tweets to “clean up” their reputations themselves. However, this can be an extremely labor intensive and anxiety ridden undertaking, which in many cases —due to the sheer volume of Facebook updates, tweets, Flickr photos and blog posts—might not be successful. This has resulted in the creation of a new type of Web specialists known as reputation managers who work at companies like Reputation.com and Metal Rabbit Media. These companies offer their clients’ services designed to expunge negative blog posts, tweets and photos, bury unfavorable Google search results and monitor clients’ “virtual image.”
Unlike individual users who manually try to remove incriminating information by themselves, reputation management companies actually write code or develop algorithms to expunge or reduce the impact of potentially damaging material. Not surprisingly, these services are not free and they typically cost $120 to $600 per year for the “average person.” Celebrities, politicians and corporate executives are usually charged $5,000 to $10,000 per month (fame is expensive so be careful what you wish for).
Obviously, unfortunate digital fiascos can easily be averted if you stop and think about the content before you post it. This bit of advice is extremely important for those who are actively involved in a job search. To that end, I highly recommend that active jobseekers routinely Google themselves to get a “digital snapshot “of the information about them on the Web. However, if you determine that “genie is already out of the bottle” (and you can’t force it back in by yourself) then it may be time to call in the professionals!
For more information on digital reputation management please read the post “Erasing the Digital Past.”
Until next time..
Good Luck and Good Job Hunting (be careful out there)
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