Want a job? Clean up your Web act

Source: Special to CNET News.com

Employers are increasingly checking out online personal information about candidates when making recruitment decisions.

Net reputations built up through online activities--such as blogging, posting videos to YouTube, or using social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.com--can have a significant effect when applying for a job, according to a report from business social network Viadeo.

According to the research, released Wednesday, one in five employers finds information about candidates on the Internet, and 59 percent of those said it influences recruitment decisions.

A fourth of human resources decision makers said they had rejected candidates based on personal information found online. Most people, however, remain unaware of the effect their Net reputation can have on their job prospects.

Read more: http://news.com.com/Want+a+job+Clean+up+your+Web+act/2100-1025_3-6171187.html?tag=nefd.top

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Remember that your eMail name could give a HR search tech a place to google, example;
dumbnuts at someplace.com. So open an eMail account for only job contacts with a name that is fit for for an employers eyes and never use it for anything else.

I once received two resumes where the applicants email addresses were "HotHornyMilf@Somedomain.net" and "9InDik4You@Someotherdomain.net". Seriously. How in seven hells was I supposed to take them seriously after that?

Folks, if you want to have a humorous or suggestive email address, that's your business. But when you're applying for a job PLEASE open a GMail account and pick something innocuous for your job hunt. You don't have to give it to your friends or family, just to your potential employers. Using email addresses like that tells potential employers a LOT about you, including the fact that you've got a terrible sense of discretion.

And no, neither of them got the job.

I had one with the email addy "captainmorgan4prez". Yeah, he's going to be there Saturday morning at 7:30.

She was cut before interviews, so I honestly have no idea whether she lived up to the moniker or not.

Truthfully, I could populate an entire book with the incredibly stupid things I've seen people put in their resumes. I once had someone list "S&M and Bondage" as one of their hobbies, and had another guy lead his resume off with a two paragraph rant about how he shouldn't be hired if I am an asshole, because he was sick of working for assholes and didn't want me to waste his time. I didn't :)

I keep a file in the cabinet for the especially entertaining ones.

...that help me understand how Bush got elected.

Stupid isn't even the right word. Clueless? Maybe. Arrogant, somewhat. Uncomprehending? Insensitive? "Cannot-connect-the-dots"? "Cannot-separate-work-from-play"? Tactless?

There was a skit on Mind of Mencia that pointed out that when a Mexican immigrant can get a LEGAL, minimum wage job WITHOUT SPEAKING ENGLISH, that means that the American citizens who interviewed were definitely exhibiting some behavior that made them "unhirable".

We have become a society that sees no reason to hide ANYTHING from employers. We have forgotten the definition of professionalism. Or, worse still, some of us feel that it does not apply to us.

And then we wonder why...

about this. I bet you'd have NO trouble at all finding a publisher.

Why not?

What exactly does MILF stand for? I hesitate to do any kind of search for fear of getting all kind of X-Rated hits...

From American Pie.

When a woman calls herself a MILF, she's generally indicating that she's an older woman looking for sex with a younger guy. 45 year old women dating 25 year old guys, that sort of thing.

When a guy says a woman is a MILF, he's simply indicating that she's an older woman that he'd LIKE to sleep with. When a woman says she's a MILF, she's admitting that she's willing to do so.

Although that movie probably mainstreamed it.

I can't give my parents my son's email address.

i couldn't give her my son's either. luckily, he's not job hunting at the moment.

:)

A friend of mine, looking for computer releated work, kept using a webtv address. Can't impagine how well that went over...

Or at least get her an interview.

However, I see that all the time. People should have a business email and a "play" email. I answer the emails for our company, and whenever I see those, I always think, "Why don't they get a serious email?"

I don't like what this country has become.

There used to be room in this country to make a mistake and then be allowed to start over again clean.

No more.

Fuck this!!!

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On edit: For those of you who are treating this lightly...

Posting on DU would be enough to get you disqualified at at least a large minority of "workplaces"! Think about it.

When I was entering the work world you didn't have to supply a credit check, criminal background check, pee in a bottle, and now, an internet search to see if you've ever said something a prospective employer doesn't "like".

What's next, a list of your friends and family so THEY can be checked?

At this rate, soon you will have to supply a blood draw for a DNA sample and a brain scan -- so they can check your genetic predispositions and your brain makeup to see if you're suitable for exploitation!!!

FUCK IT! FUCK IT! FUCK IT! FUCK IT! FUCK IT! FUCK IT!

Someone can post whatever (s)he wants about you. And then a perspective employer is going to use that? :crazy:

The mechanism is different, but it's really not all that different from the old "provide three personal references unrelated to you" line that has been on applications since the beginning of applications. Employers have always wanted to know what kind of person you are, so they can have some kind of idea what kind of employee you would be.

If you post on the Internet, that's public information. If you put your real name on things you've placed on the Internet, you're inviting the whole planet to look at it. You really don't have a legitimate argument that employers somehow have no right to look at your own PUBLIC history. Everything you post on the Internet is readable by everyone on the planet, including employers.

And yes, I do look up Internet histories for prospective employees. I don't do credit checks, criminal background checks, or drug checks (without cause anyway...my employee contract says that employees have 48 hours to produce a clean drug test if they're sent home for suspicion of being under the influence, but the clause has never actually been used).

As for the fairness of using Internet searches, I have only one thing to say: If you were the left-wing owner of a solidly blue company, with solidly blue employees throughout, wouldn't you want to know if a potential applicant was an avid poster over in Freeperland? Wouldn't you want to know if he was an argumentative loudmouth who constantly bellowed against Roe v. Wade, gays, and who thought that the Iraq war was God's righteous wrath on those evil brown people? Or would you prefer to respect his "privacy", and unknowingly inflict him on your employees?

I'll do the Internet search thankyouverymuch.

I don't think anyone should generally be barred from a job because of his or her political beliefs or activities. Unfortunately the reality is that I don't expect to EVER work for a solidly blue company with solidly blue employees unless it's a job directly related to politics. I get what you're saying, that the internet is a public place, and if you're careless enough to make your personal information so accessible, it's your problem if it's used against you. On the other hand, it's too easy for employers to find out information about you that they aren't allowed to ask in the interview, e.g. what your age is, whether you're married and/or have kids, what your religious/political affiliation or sexual orientation is, etc. It's too easy for me to imagine someone being denied a job because a prejudiced employer happens to find a web-page where that person admits to being a homosexual or a Muslim or a feminist. Now, you probably wouldn't want to work for an employer like that anyway, but the reality is that laws restricting the questions an employer can ask you about your personal life are there specifically because there ARE employers like that whom we sometimes HAVE to work for. I don't know what the answer to this problem is, and I can certainly understand the dilemma of employers who are trying to pick the best person to work for them on very limited information; but it just seems that there's too much potential for some employers to use the information they have access to on the internet unfairly.

This is now in the public record for "antigone382"

"I don't think anyone should generally be barred from a job because of his or her political beliefs or activities. Unfortunately the reality is that I don't expect to EVER work for a solidly blue company with solidly blue employees unless it's a job directly related to politics. I get what you're saying, that the internet is a public place, and if you're careless enough to make your personal information so accessible, it's your problem if it's used against you. On the other hand, it's too easy for employers to find out information about you that they aren't allowed to ask in the interview, e.g. what your age is, whether you're married and/or have kids, what your religious/political affiliation or sexual orientation is, etc. It's too easy for me to imagine someone being denied a job because a prejudiced employer happens to find a web-page where that person admits to being a homosexual or a Muslim or a feminist. Now, you probably wouldn't want to work for an employer like that anyway, but the reality is that laws restricting the questions an employer can ask you about your personal life are there specifically because there ARE employers like that whom we sometimes HAVE to work for. I don't know what the answer to this problem is, and I can certainly understand the dilemma of employers who are trying to pick the best person to work for them on very limited information; but it just seems that there's too much potential for some employers to use the information they have access to on the internet unfairly."

And every other post we've ever made...in some form or another on the NSA computers...

That is just an astoundingly bad idea. You do know that entire web presences are faked by vengeful former SOs, PR companies, etc. don't you? And as more people find out the employers like you are doing that, the more motivation people have for faking information on the net.

The old "provide their personal references whose credibility cannot be conclusively verified" idea was bad enough, but you might as well believe in Santa Claus as believe the net is going to provide you with valid information about a person.

I just want to know what things that you found on the Internet that affected your hiring decisions?

I run a creative technology company (small, our staffing varies from 7 to 15 depending on workload) and generally spend time looking at past work, creative hobbies, things like that. I only hire creative people, and want to make sure that all potential hires meet that definition (even the office receptionist is a creative person...she spent three years working as a sidewalk chalk artist in San Francisco, and even today can often be found painting and drawing at her desk when the phone isn't ringing).

I actually have a perfect example of how I use it, because it just happened a month ago and includes someone who DIDN'T get the job because of his Internet history. I had one applicant boast heavily about an open-source app he'd written, and how his experience with that app made him a good fit for the job I had open. So I jumped onto Sourceforge and a couple of other sites relating to his particular software genra (web based DBMS monitoring) and searched forums and articles for any write-ups or comments on his software. This search revealed three things to me: 1) His software was overwhelmingly slammed by users. 2) Anyone who posted a question on the mailing list for the software could expect a flaming "RTFM NOOB!" in response, and he was extremely unhelpful. 3) He had a nasty habit of creating two bugs for every bug he fixed. Based on all of that, he didn't get the job.

I had one other situation where an email address search turned up several strong anti-gay posts on a Catholic message board. Since I'm bi and my lead programmer is gay, he was passed over for the job.

It does go the other way too. When I hired our lead graphic designer, I did a web search for her and turned up several galleries full of her photographic work. I found numerous attractive websites she'd designed, and had even found a copy of a paper she'd written in college about designing visually attractive websites that maintained their accessibility for disabled users. Based on her resume alone, I probably wouldn't have hired her. She was only a year out of college, had little commercial experience, and was incredibly shy and reserved in the interview. The web search gave me a glimpse into her creativity and led me to hire her. Today she is the go-to person in the company for design and artistic questions.

I know I usually do a search on folks I'm going to play some music with or etc.

I applaud your ethics.

I still mourn the world I grew up in when anonymity and a fresh start were possible...

What matters more to someone? Their privacy or their 15 minutes?

If your 15 minutes aren't exploitable enough to parlay into something more beneficial, learn to enjoy being an unknown slouch.

(sorry, I didn't mean to come off so bruskly here)

no problem. We do the work and don't talk politics...

It's still bullshit...

I'm retired, so fuck 'em...

But I care deeply about those of you (and my children and grandchildren) who are going to have to live in this fucked up "Brave New World" of the persistent memory of the police state.

I wish you all could know how much better it used to be... but the genie's out of the bottle and we're all fucked...

"There used to be room in this country to make a mistake
and then be allowed to start over again clean."

Not anymore with your every move being recorded
in AnyJudgementalJerk's:freak: version of your own private Dossier.

"1984" really does exist.

When Googling someone takes seconds, and might save a company years of legal fees--or even lives? Of course they're going to check you out, and it wouldn't surprise me to hear of bounties offered for spotting deal-breakers.

People often look both ways before crossing a street, too.

The lesson is to keep any non-work-friendly identities separate from your real name.

feast? Already it's getting harder and harder to get the credentials to get a job that pays less than when I started out using an inflation factor.

It can't come too soon for me. I can't imagine how oppressive everything is going to get, when it's this bad now. Already we go through metal detectors, pee in a bottle, etc., etc. It will never be enough for the corporations until we have a world as depicted in "Gattica" -- totally strangulated and stratified.

People doing the hiring simply won't trust anyone who doesn't have an internet personality, like, "Hmmmm, what are they trying to hide???"

The internet is for public use. Considering many employers are using background checks, this is any easier and cheaper first attempt to gather information.

Still I'd prefer that employers don't take religious and political beliefs into account before hiring a person. But at the same time, this could help some employers from hiring intolerant people in the first place. Sometime blogs also give an interesting perspective into a prospective employee's background.

document for my main screen name. It was the minutes for a band booster meeting, one of my better efforts. I was impressed reading it a year or so later. :D

So, let any prospective employers go ahead and google my e-mail addy!

and the only one I give to any employer--and nothing comes up--just like I knew it would.

My other email address isn't any of their business.

billoreillyisatool@***.com
fairandbalancedmyass@***.com
noneofyourphuckingbusiness@***.com

Guess i shouldn't use those ones, eh?

:evilgrin:

A conservative little christian 28 year old HR girl going to ok hiring a liberal blogger IT person...

Will a liberal gay woman HR person discriminate against a right wing nut if they were qualified and professional....


you get the picture

Although it would depend on how nutty and how blatent...


I'm reminded of one office I worked in where it was ok to have religious symbols and crosses hanging in cubicle but when I put up my "666" fish...

well...

but...

What if one's health care weren't tied to one's employment? What if there were universal Single-Payer and everyone were covered.

I suspect that the difficulties in severing an employer/employee relationship could be made easier and more amicable.

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I do shudder at the though of HR drones using "information" from the internet as any basis in a hiring decision. Being a curmudgeonly, Socialist Artist, I know I would probably never be hired anywhere given my internet "profile". :evilgrin: