Archive for November, 2009

something for all of us on sharenotes.com to consider is the possibility of the digital paper trail we might be leaving as we move past graduation and eye our future careers. In the past if someone snapped a questionable pic or heard perhaps a incendiary comment, these actions reached a handful of people at most. And most of the time, those people were almost never your employers (or future employers).

But in today’s world, a great deal of our lives, our politics, our views, our parties are all on the internet for anyone to see. Generally this makes little impact on our daily lives, particularly when we are in college. It seems that everyone has some dirt on them floating around, and who cares really? Well I’ll tell you who, you’re future employer cares. Reference checks are old school and don’t mean a whole lot, however google checks are very much the norm now a days. What comes up when you get google’d can sometimes make or break you.

According to a new study by careerbuilder.com one of the ten strongest reasons for being hired these days is a strong web presence. And by strong I don’t mean how many times you’ve been tagged on Facebook doing a keg stand. Strong web presence is right up there with “great resume” and “creative problem solving” so it’s weighted quite heavily for some employers.

In the past prospective employers were forced to judge us based solely on the neatly packaged vision of us we choose to show them. Our resume, our interview and some hand picked references where really all they had to go by. We had a great deal of control over that, however now social media has given employers a window into our personal lives and all that entails. Because of the ease of access employers don’t even need to reference why or what they might find questionable about you, they simply pass and move along to the next application.

So while it may seem the norm while in college to lay it all out there, being dirt free is something to consider once you’ve hit the final strides of college life. The problem is social networking is.. well social, you may not have direct control over all the media that is out there and associated with you. Sure you could take off the pics on your personal accounts, but what about all your friends? And there is a matter of the cache of google search results, it can take time before page rankings change and you’re questionable material falls off the search results, so plan ahead.

Careerbuilder.com goes on to say that being online does not have to be a bad thing. If you make strong connections with people within the industry and perhaps within the companies you mean to apply with, these kinds of positive “references” can also help you. No one can tell you what you should or should not post up. And quite frankly no one can say what, if anything a would be employer might find questionable, so that much you will have to judge for yourself.
What I can tell you is that employers are looking and making decisions on what they see. And those decisions could effect the careers of many of us here on sharenotes.com, hopefully all for the best. I can hear the clicking already .. “delete” “delete” “delete”…