Job Hunting? Don’t Forget to Manage Your Online Rep

At first, PR executive Samantha Steinwinder thought she had an embarrassment of riches: two strong candidates for an account coordinator opening, a position that demanded experience in both traditional PR and social media. One candidate was a blogger; the other, an avid Twitter user. Both had impressive LinkedIn profiles and carried themselves well over the phone. “I was excited about hiring either of them, or both,” Steinwinder recalls.

Then, she read candidate A’s blog, which was rife with grammatical errors, awkward sentence structures, and personal stories about her relationship with friends, food, and her cat. “While it was her personal blog and not intended to promote her business or clients, it still gave me a sense of her writing style and personal life, and I didn’t see a fit with our agency,” Steinwinder said. Meanwhile, candidate B tweeted about feeling bored at work.
Steinwinder decided not to hire either candidate. “While they both did engage in social media, a requirement for the job, neither was doing it in a way that positioned them well professionally,”
she said.

The chances that employers are looking for you online—and judging you based on what they find—are pretty high.
“Every employer who is worth their salt does Google potential employees, and employers who say they don’t are not telling the truth,” said Susan Heathfield, a human resources expert. In fact, according to a 2009 CareerBuilder survey, 30 percent of hiring managers are using Facebook to research new hires.

Given that the Web is so pervasive and transparent, where does that leave us? Career coaches and human resource managers say it’s impossible to hide offline altogether, but agree there are ways people with a past can edit the bad, hide the ugly, and highlight the good.

Professional is As Professional Does

At a time when 140-character updates can pass for business communications, it may be difficult to distinguish between showing personality and behaving unprofessionally. Recruiters and career coaches agree on the obvious things: people should scrub their online persona of sexually explicit material and illegal activity.
But what about our hobbies or home videos? Depending on who you talk to, anecdotes from our personal lives can come off as charming or inappropriate. To some extent, it depends on the kind of job for which you’re applying. For instance, Allison Nawoj, a spokesperson for CareerBuilder says that it would behoove photographers to keep their online photo albums public.

But Donna Mastroianni, director of corporate recruiting at Marsh and McLennan Companies, a professional services firm, doesn’t want to see your Facebook profile. She says there’s a difference between a social networking site and a professional networking one. And while she might not fault you for drinking a beer or two, your indiscretion in publicizing it is a huge turn-off. “I always look at the judgment that’s being used to display that information,” she said.

Walking that line can be even more difficult with Twitter, whose all-or-nothing privacy settings encourage users to mix personal and professional messages. Kimm Viebrock, a career coach, likens the experience to an epic job interview, the kind that begins in an HR department and ends over lunch. “A lot of people forget during those times they’re still on the interview,” she said. “Whatever is on your profile is part of your interview process.” The only solution, to steal an Oprahism: be your best self.

Kevin Kimball, who is looking for a job in corporate communications, has found a tame form of self-expression in LinkedIn Groups. This environment doesn’t have fields where you can reveal potentially controversial information, such as religion, political views, or marital status. In other words, these groups are inherently more appropriate than, say, the prospect of an employer finding comments you left under your own name in a hobbyist forum.

Moreover, says Kimball, the groups allow him not just to appear human, but to engage in networking. Be it a Boston Red Sox fan group or one for other corporate communications types, he suddenly has access to a new base of contacts.

Clean Up Your Act

What information you choose to reveal about yourself is only the first step in managing your online reputation. To some extent, you can also control what employers (or anyone else) see when they search for you, whether through Google, LinkedIn, or anywhere else.

The key, by all accounts, is search engine optimization. As a rule of thumb, popular sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter will push more obscure results to the bottom. So, even if you’re not interested in actively using these services, just creating an account might be enough to push less-than-flattering content out of sight. In other words, claim your name early, and often.

Google even lets users create an online profile, which will appear on the first page of Google results when someone searches for you. In addition to basic information, users can link to other Google services, such as their Picasa or YouTube accounts. While the experts are divided on whether or not this is appropriate (CareerBuilder’s Nawoj says they can be, provided the content is work-relevant; Marsh and McLennan’s Mastroianni says no), creating an account, at the very least, will make your first page of results that much more benign.

In addition to hiding blemishes from your past, you can manipulate the Web to highlight the accomplishments you’re actually proud of. On LinkedIn, for instance, it helps to add keywords to your profile; this will increase the chances of other users finding you when they search for, say, “architect” or “management consultant.” Steve Siegel, who has used the site for several job searches, has found the keywords helpful, adding that the accumulation of recommendations from former colleagues has helped increase his visibility.

Takeaways

Staying offline is impossible. So keep things classy, or you may be passed over for that job you’re otherwise perfect for. As career coach Viebrock says, “Actively manage it. Don’t just let it happen.”