Thinning tactics are not new to corporate HR departments. To reduce the number of applicants in serious consideration for a given position, a hiring officer might take a quick look at a stack of resumes and junk all the ones without a college degree. Or 86 those demonstrating a scatter-shot employment history.
Or, they might skim the resume, then google a job seeker to find disqualifying information, sometimes referred to as ‘digital dirt.’ TechWeb says that ExecuNet recently surveyed 100 executive headhunters, and found that 35 of them had dumped candidates based on public info located on the net. That’s almost half the number of firms – seventy-seven – that reported using the ‘net to find info on potential hires.
Meanwhile, a separate study showed that 82 percent of executives expected recruiters to look them up online, but only 33 percent had ever checked to see what the internet has to say about them. We’re guessing, though, that the danger of having any disastrous info on, say, a Livejournal is greater for recent grads who are just starting out, people with their party-hard college days only a few steps in the rear-view mirror – and painstakingly documented on the web.
TechWeb links to a handy CollegeJournal piece that offers advice on how to scrub up your online image before sending out your resume. The first part’s easy: look yourself up in a search engine. Depending on what embarrassments you turn up, the solution might be as easy as ‘take down that Friendster pic of you twirling on a stripper pole.’
Information beyond your control might be more problematic. If a website owner declines to expunge the record of your undergraduate misbehavior, there’s really only one thing to do (other than a nice, legal name change): rank higher. Start a blog or a site (or even dust off the one you started in 2003), then get to work filling it with positive personal and professional info. Write it well, prominently feature your name, and accumulate some relevant links. After all, if you can’t eliminate unpleasant info, you can certainly push it farther down the results page – underneath something you might want a potential employer to find.
