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The Online Job Search - Hiding Your Cyberspace Skeletons from Your Employers

It used to be that when you send in a resume, the most that any potential employer could do short of sending a private detective after you, was maybe ask your former employers about you. The Internet now though is a vast resource of permanent records of personal and public information that anyone can tap at will. You did read about that single Twitter message that landed someone a great job? If there is anything in your past on the Internet that could possibly make you not look good in an online job search, well, the first thing that hiring managers do these days is to look up the name on a resume to see what easy information Google has. If you were ever in a Greenpeace protest ten years ago, and pictures were published, or if you like to put some politically unpopular views on Twitter, or if you published a paper that wasn't well received, all of that could potentially show up on a simple Google search. Let's say that some of this might apply to you, how do you keep these from appearing on Google and upending your job search before it's even begun?

One way to approach it would be to simply call the websites in question and ask them politely if they could do you favor and take the offending content off. Sometimes, people can respond positively when asked nicely. But people do have a thing for freedom of speech; if the item you're after happens to be, say, an interview you gave on TV in which you made a lot of mistakes, publishing that video could mean drawing a lot of viewers to that website. How would they give that up just because you asked nicely? But what if it isn't someone else doing it - what if it is your own social networking website that you put something embarrassing on long before you ever knew it could come home to hurt you? Of course you could adjust your privacy settings the right way; but often, this is not possible if it's spread on Facebook, to other people's pages. There is one way to keep your online job search afloat in such a case: go out there and put as much positive stuff about yourself on the Internet, that the negative gets pushed out of the top ten search results on Google.

You could sign up to trade blogs and forums and post good serious comments that show your good and employable side. Now this does sound like a lot of hard work, and it is. If you would like to do a little Internet whitewashing, and you have a little money to burn for it, you could just hire the experts. Companies like ReputationDefender, will do all of this and more for you, for a couple of hundred dollars in fees. Services like this will make it their job to go online and publish so much positive -ounding stuff about you on many websites, any itty-bitty embarrassing detail about you Internet will easily be crowded off the charts. It may not always work, but it is worth a shot. If you are on an online job hunt, all you need to do is first Google yourself up, to see if you have anything unpleasant online. If it can't be fixed with a little Facebook privacy settings tweaking, well, you have a job on your hands.

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