Watch What You Put on the Internet: Myspace Could Cost You A Job
4 August 2006What does Myspace have to do with personal finance? It turns out, plenty - employers are starting to perform Google searches of people who are prospective job applicants. And what you put on the Internet will come up in relation to your name, especially if you’ve got a unique one. CNN notes that colleges are increasingly warning students to be very careful about these sites:
Police are increasingly monitoring the sites. And it’s not hard for prospective employers to get a “.edu” e-mail address from an alumnus or an intern, and recruiters are increasingly trolling the Internet to scope out prospective hires.
“They may be looking at these sites wondering if there’s a personality fit with their company culture,” said Tim Luzader, director of Purdue’s center for career opportunities. A recent survey there found that a third of employers recruiting there ran job applicants’ names through search engines, and 12 percent said they looked at social networking sites.
This should be common sense. You wouldn’t put a joke answering machine message on your voicemail and then put that number on your resume. You wouldn’t walk into an interview with a beer in each hand and your tie on your forehead. You don’t want that to be the impression a potential employer gets of you - so why would you want them to see a picture of you doing the same thing when they type your name into Google? My advice for this whole thing is:
1) If you want a MySpace account or a personal web page and you want to put up pictures of you passed out with obscenities drawn on your face in marker by your friends, don’t do it in your name. Stick to “TotallyWasted2006″ or something no one can identify.
2) Make sure your friends keep your name out of it, too - a hard sell given how willing they were to draw stuff on you in that picture.
3) If you’re going to make a website, make it one that will make someone willing to hire you. For example, do a site related to your career. If your blog is about marketing topics, and an employer stumbles on it, you’re going to get brownie points and not be thrown into the trash pile. Or do a web site about an interesting hobby. I mean interesting, not weird. Your trip to Ghana to feed orphans is fair game for the Internet. Your transformers costume with functioning Optimus Prime vocal sounds should not be associated with you in any way an employer can find it.
4) BUY THE DOMAIN WITH YOUR NAME IN IT. You don’t want some other nutjob putting up a webpage and having employers think it’s you. My boss is older, normal, and well respected in his field, and yet someone grabbed his name’s .COM. So when you search for his name, you get a 20 year old who likes ninja swords and is writing a story about Zoltar the Destroyer and his imminent conquest of Earth. It only costs about $10 a year or so to keep ownership of the name and keep it out of circulation.
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