Google Yourself

Rick Dressler, Campus Representative, Syracuse University

Want a great way to procrastinate? Google yourself. See what comes up. Is it your track times from high school? Or some middle aged real estate agent from Arkansas? Or maybe a picture you posted to Facebook your freshman year of college of you in front of a very carefully designed pyramid of vodka bottles that had accumulated by the end of the semester? This is, in all likelihood, what a hiring manager does after an interview. We've all heard about keeping our facebooks PG-13 for future employers, but there is simply more to it than that.

It is difficult to move things down further in a google search. The easiest way to do this is to create more things. Barbara Safani helps people do just that at her career management firm in New York. She suggested in an article written by the New York Times that people create professional profiles on social networking sites like LinkedIn and ZoomInfo. Having these legitimate business oriented social networking sites show up ahead of your personal Facebook can be incredibly beneficial. Instead of tarnishing your image, you will be reiterating to the perspective employer your prior work experiences etc. Maintaining a professional online presence can be an important variable when it comes to landing a job.

The amount of data an employer could find about you is astonishing. Your political allegiances, your buying habits, your interests, your hobbies, all things that used to come from developing a relationship with people at a company can now be screened using the web. Scary isn't it? While most employers are not going to scour your online presence with a microscope, you must be cognizant of what information a simple Google search of your name can provide someone who is in the position to give you a job. Don't go de-tag every picture of you on Facebook from the last 4 years, but think about making a LinkedIn or ZoomInfo account, or come up with some other new way to legitimize your online persona and don't give HR a reason to dig deeper into your online self.