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23 Jan 2008
Who's Googling Whom?
A recent Washington Post article reports that a growing number of DC-area private schools are warning students about the risks of making too-personal postings to blogs, message boards, and Facebook.
We'll elaborate on that point in a moment.
What sparked our interest for job seekers was this whole matter of Googling. Just how often are recruiters Googling job candidates? According to a 2005 survey of 102 executive recruiters by ExecuNet, an executive job-search and networking organization, 75% of recruiters use search engines to uncover information about candidates, and 26% of recruiters have eliminated candidates because of information found online. What does your online profile look like? Try doing a Google search on your name and see what comes up. Then go to Yahoo and enter your name in quotes in the search box. Does anything come up? Check the contents thoroughly to make sure it won't hurt your job search chances.
While we don't think prospective students
have too much to fear in terms of college admissions
officers lurking in the shadows, looking for
risqué or offensive content on
personal blogs, job candidates face a different situation with
large numbers of recruiters doing web research on prospective
employees.
College admissions officers have more than enough to keep themselves busy without taking on the task of Googling
every student who applies to their school. Hiring managers,
as we noted above, have a different take on this matter.
Job seekers and prospective students alike need to
consider the tone of their messages posted on discussion boards. Those bound for
college should know that admissions officers do read
admissions boards, especially those devoted to particular programs or schools.
While they're more concerned about
general admissions issues, they may remember someone
with an arrogant or abusive writing style.
We should all mind our manners on discussion boards. While we
may be seething with anger over a present matter, do we want an angry message
– with the potential to be kept online in perpetuity – to accidentally become
part of the first impression we make to a gatekeeper?
 back
to January blog
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