Online persona killing your future?

August 29, 2006 · Filed Under For the love of HR, Recruiting in the 21st Century, Stupid Employee Tricks 

Probably not.

Oh don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen the statistics.  Nearly half of employers googled a candidate in the last year and a third made a decision based on that. It is awful to think of those poor people who were disregarded because of some drunken photos on MySpace.

As a disclaimer, I have googled the name of almost everyone who has come to work for us. And no, none of them lost consideration because of it (though a few stuffy companies might have done so with what I found).  At best, most of the information I found had little to nothing to do with the ability for these people to perform their job.
The point I make is that assuming your online persona isn’t incredibly unemployable (and I would guess that about 98% of them fall in that category), you aren’t going to be denied a good opportunity at a good company.  Most decent companies are going to have some kind of policy about using outside information to come to a job decision.  Most decent companies are going to exercise good judgement on this matter too.

But if you are a company that can’t stand if one of your interns has a picture of him and his buddies at a bar and you are the type of person that doesn’t mind making that information public, maybe you aren’t being denied a good opportunity after all. Job fit and company culture play a major role in your future as an employee and along with your future boss, this sort of clash of cultures might kill your job chances anyway.

It isn’t going to become less common for employers to do an internet search for you. If you are concerned about what your chances are with a company based on what you find about yourself, you should try to sanitize it.

Or then again, maybe not.  You might just be doing yourself a favor.

Disclaimer 2: My boss at work has seen my MySpace profile. It has several unprofessional pictures on it (including drinking pictures). She thought it was great. Of course, I don’t think it is bad for HR to show any sort of personality. We have to beat accounting!

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Comments

7 Responses to “Online persona killing your future?”

  1. Hattie on August 30th, 2006 6:29 am

    I have to ask though, how many pages do they sift through after googling your name? My name pulls up several responses, almost all of which actually have nothing to do with me personally. (It’s mostly geneology records, etc.) I’m just curious on this.

    [Reply]

  2. Luc on August 30th, 2006 12:31 pm

    Yeah, I routinely Google and MySpace applicants as a personality/CV check, but when I did the same for myself, I found that A) my MySpace is the first thing that comes up on Google anyhow, B) the second page was a report with my name in it (flattering, but brief, and not something I would have put on my resume), and C) I’m a professional bull rider and wakeboarder (who knew?). That’s why it’s only a cursory part of the process; just making sure the facts on the resume match the facts on the internet, and a check on how they would fit within our very small workplace.

    One story though:
    I was checking an applicant’s MySpace immediately after recieving her resume and found all kinds of underage drinking pictures and a general attitude of young, college, party animal. When the hiring process sped up and I was calling people to schedule interviews, I went back to her page to put a face with the name, and she had set her profile to private (a common practice for those who prefer not to professionalize their pages). She got hired (the party pictures fit with company culture around here; we recruit college students for work in their field of study), and about a week later, profile wasn’t private anymore.

    I only find that story funny because I read a news article not to long ago about an applicant for a government job with Washington State who did the same thing, but he had his privacy settings bypassed by the State in accordance with the USA Patriot Act. He had to pull a few strings with parents’ friends, but he got the position. I guess it really is WHO you know…

    [Reply]

  3. Recruitomatic on September 1st, 2006 4:30 am

    Peter Gold addresses the issue of privacy and MySpace on his blog Hire Strategies - see here: http://blog.hirestrategies.co.uk/erecruitment/2006/08/myspace_mydetai.html - and I ask, who is eduacting employers on this matter? I also reply on my counterpost: Rupert Murdoch: Privacy, Screening, Smoke & Mirrors. Take a look: http://recruitomatic.wordpress.com/2006/08/31/rupert-murdoch-privacy-screening-smoke-mirrors/.

    To Luc’s comment, you’re right - google Rupert Murdoch and you’ll see what I mean.

    Amitai

    (Your HR Guy, no trackback?)

    [Reply]

  4. Your HR Guy on September 1st, 2006 7:41 am

    Where did I miss the trackback?

    [Reply]

  5. Recruitomatic on September 1st, 2006 6:37 pm

    I couldn’t trackback here.

    [Reply]

  6. Recruitomatic on September 1st, 2006 6:38 pm

    Der… disregard my last. Caffeine withdrawal.

    [Reply]

  7. Amitai Givertz's Recruitomatic Blog on September 22nd, 2006 7:00 am

    College Career Centers: Reality Online Checks Out

    If I was a student today – like you are perhaps – I would be pretty ticked off with the quality of online services and resources being provided by my college’s career center. Of course, there are always exceptions and I’m sure that somewhere ou…

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