EXCELER8ion is participating in a “BlogSwap” with some of the best recruiting community Bloggers. Here is the first terrific guest post from Louise Fletcher of the Blue Sky Resumes Blog:
As the owner of a career marketing business, I’ve been following the debate about My Space pages and online personal branding with interest.
On a personal level, I side with Shannon who disagrees with the “vanilla-izing” of our corporations and said this:
“Maybe Recruiters shouldn’t go looking for ‘dirt’ about candidates online unless they are willing to do that for their current employees – they might be surprised at what they find.”
But on a practical level, I think (a) research of potential employees online will continue and (b) companies will start looking for dirt about existing employees (if they’re not doing it already.)
Employers have always been interested in certain aspects of their employees’ personal lives. It just used to be much harder for them to find that information. Back in a former life, I was an HR VP and I fought 2 CEOs on the issue of drug testing. I felt very strongly that we had no business knowing whether our accountants smoked marijuana at home and, since the companies in question were in the music and video game industries, I was also pretty sure that we’d be opening a huge can of worms, not to mention losing the bulk of our management teams! I won my battles but in many companies drug testing is the norm.
It’s MUCH easier to check into someone’s background online than to find out if someone’s using drugs. And it’s easy for employers to claim innocence if they fire an employee our of the blue, because who can prove that they ever looked at a My Space page? Is it really a stretch to imagine an HR Manager checking a My Space page because of suspicions of substance abuse? Or to picture a homophobic manager snooping around online to find out if his employee is gay?
I recently wrote a resume for a music producer seeking investors for a new business venture. As I always do, I checked out his My Space page and the very first image was a picture of him making rock hands with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He’s a nice guy and the picture was a spoof of rocker behavior, but I still made him replace it that day. Who’s going to give $15 million to a guy who looks like that?
At 43, I feel I’m a little too old for a My Space page, but I do keep several blogs, both personal and business-related and I don’t put anything online that I’m not comfortable with others seeing. I’ll admit a few foibles on my blogs, like my irrational interest in American Idol or my sadness about England getting knocked out of the World Cup (again!) but I won’t post anything that might really tarnish my personal brand. (OK, American Idol might put a little dent in it, but I’ll survive that one.)
I don’t know what the answer to all this is, other than I think everyone has to be realistic. The web offers unprecedented career marketing opportunities for savvy individuals – you can advance your personal brand through a business-related blog, a Squidoo lens, an online portfolio, or a MySpace or Tagworld page – but it also presents real pitfalls. It’s crazy to think that anything we put on the web is private and it’s naïve to hope that employers will restrain themselves from snooping around. That means the juicy stuff needs to be carefully guarded. Maybe Six Apart’s new Vox service is the beginning of an answer since it will allow bloggers to make certain things private while others are public, but I don’t think technology is the problem right now – rather it’s the fact that a whole generation of people are expressing themselves online in the naïve belief that nothing they say will come back to bite them. I wish things were different, but they’re not.
EXCELER8ion is where Shannon and Julian Seery Gude write on Social Media & Recruiting, Digital Marketing, Technology, Internet Business, and other Geekiness. 
8 comments ↓
Probably the hottest topic in recruitment right now, is the whole issue of online networking and what it means for job seekers. I blogged about this as a guest writer forexcelera8ion and my post came at about the exact same time as this post by Todd Hilton, a Microsoft software developer who was guest posting on the Hire Calling blog. Todd writes: You might consider the persona you present online to be personal and none of your
Ironically (a small segue) one would have thought that the potential anonymity would have spawned limitless pretense and posturing on the virtual web—but surprisingly it’s actually fostered honesty and dropping of masks (otherwise the wholemyspace-recruitment
Ironically (a small segue) one would have thought that the potential anonymity would have spawned limitless pretense and posturing on the virtual web—but surprisingly it’s actually fostered honesty and dropping of masks (otherwise the whole myspace-recruitment debate wouldn’t be happenning). It would seem given a choice people would like to be who they are—the real world just doesn’t give them that much of a choice! So why is it that the virtual world has succeeded in spawning a culture, which is
How funny, this runs right along with my chosen topic posted over at Hire Calling yesterday (http://www.ere.net/blogs/Hire_Calling/5519616B495B4BB4BF3D27759C6CE379.asp). Obviously this is a hot topic in the recruiting industry.
As to your opinion, I couldn’t agree more. The bottom line is that we (the job seekers) have to be realistic. What we put online is public information (for the most part) available to everyone, available all the time and probably forever. I think it’s naive of job seeker’s to expect everything marked as ‘personal’ to be ignored by potential employers. It’s just not realistic
Nice post!
Thanks Tod. I just read your post and great minds think alike
I suppose I think of the online world as no different from the offline world. I wouldn’t give an HR manager my private diary during an interview, so why post it up on the web for her to see?
It’s going to be fascinating to see how all the unfolds.
Your Online Persona…
Probably the hottest topic in recruitment right now, is the whole issue of online networking and what it means for job seekers. I blogged about this as a guest writer for excelera8ion and my post came at about the exact……
[...] EXCELER8ion – Online recruitment marketing, social media optimization, and interactive advertising – The insider’s blog about Online Recruitment and Local Interactive Advertising … I no longer have to think, now I just Google … – [2006-09-16 00:11:40] – [...]
[...] Probably the hottest topic in recruitment right now, is the whole issue of online networking and what it means for job seekers. I blogged about this as a guest writer for excelera8ion and my post came at about the exact same time as this post by Todd Hilton, a Microsoft software developer who was guest posting on the Hire Calling blog. Todd writes: You might consider the persona you present online to be personal and none of your employer’s business, but you also need to remember that your personal actions reflect on you as a whole. At Microsoft, it’s an important part of the hiring process to make sure that candidates are compatible with our company values. Anything you put online about yourself has the potential to influence this process, whether or not that is your intention. I want to leave you with one final thought. Remember that whatever you post on the internet will live a long, long time…maybe even forever! Public forums, web sites, blogs and newsgroups are archived by several companies (i.e.: Google) so before you hit that “Submit” button keep in mind that whatever you just wrote will still be available in 1, 2, 5, 10 years. That’s really good advice and I think everyone serious about managing their career effectively should frame that last sentence and put it near their PC! [...]
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