Magic Pot of Jobs

I’ve been reading a lot of complaining lately about how employers will Google potential (and sometimes current!) employees to check them out before making decisions about them. The horror! The intrusion! The disrespect of privacy!

First of all, I can’t believe that anyone who has been using the internet for longer than 10 minutes didn’t think this was happening. If you’ve ever Googled a potential date to check him/her out in advance, you should have seen this one coming.

Secondly, I can’t believe anyone sees anything WRONG with this. Hey kids, if you don’t want what you do to be known to your bosses, DON’T DO IT IN PUBLIC. The thing that makes the Internet so gosh-darn USEFUL is how very public and open it is. You don’t sunbathe naked on your lawn, so you shouldn’t post photos of yourself doing strange and unnatural things with a beer bottle on your MySpace page. You never know who might happen by. Common sense, people.

If there are some unflattering references to you on the Internet, there are a few things you can do- if the person with a compromising photo of you is a friend, you can ask him/her to take it down. Don’t bother asking Google to take it out of their results- you’ll get nowhere and your lack of forethought is not their problem.

If references exist that you can’t have taken down, the best thing to do is to engage in a little Google distraction. Register your own name as a domain, and put up a professional site- resume, work samples, links to resources of interest to your field, etc. Does this sound suspiciously like a way to take my advice about your personal brand? It is.

The way to deal with Google’s inevitable ability to find you is to be the one in control of what Google says about you. Build a site that will be the #1 search result for your name. When people Google me, my sites are what they find. Who has the patience to click through 10 pages of results to get the dirt? Not me. So associate your name with professional, constructive behavior on the internet and stop living in fear of the day your mom plugs your name into a search engine.

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Accountant Careers.co.uk provides accounting jobs in the UK via its employment Web site.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Things we shouldn't have to say. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.