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I Know What You Did Last Summer (and it’s the reason you are still unemployed!)

If you are in the business of getting people jobs, you are certainly counseling job seekers about having an online presence. This means individual and group sessions about everything from establishing email to social media. There is an online alphabet soup out there, but are we doing people justice if we are not discussing with them what happens when you search for your name.

Challenge: Search for your name. Try with quotation marks surrounding it, without quotation marks surrounding it. Try looking for the city and state you live in now and then all the places you lived in the past.

Do you like what you see? I hope so because it is following you around. The “skeletons in your closet” are there good or bad. In the internet age, I can search for a job applicant I am considering hiring. I can search for my co-workers. I can search for family and friends. This means that secrets are not secrets anymore. Yes, there are legally things that employers can and can’t consider, but what guarantee does a job seeker have?

This is a message for everyone. Youth starting out in their careers, mature job seekers trying to establish their internet presence, and everyone in between need to consider online reputation management a priority.

Do you think any of the below could effect a job search?

§  Pictures that show nudity, excessive and/or illegal types of alcohol and drug use

§  A teenager sharing a picture that involves nudity with another teenager

§  A newspaper article about a criminal conviction

§  Comments or postings on a site with extreme and or possibly offensive messages and values

I encourage everyone in the “get a job business” to take the time to not only discuss this with your job seekers, but to help them find their internet presence. Additionally, if there is a something out there that a job seeker cannot remove from the internet, but may affect his professional life, then help the job seeker manage it and find ways to address and/or explain these things if necessary. 

My thoughts on the above are to try to get the material removed from the internet by trying to contact the host of the site. If it is not possible because the information is part of a public record, then try to coach job seekers on the answers. For example, I can take down pictures I posted to Facebook, but I can’t ask the newspaper to remove an article that was reported in good faith and was factual.  

I don’t have all the answers on how to explain every situation, but that is where you, my readers, may have some experiences you would like to share. Please post a comment for all to read on what you would advise a job seeker to do in any of the above situations. If anyone has any experiences or situations on how job seekers were counseled on the above, please post also.  Thank you for reading. I can be reached at kcirincione@gmail.com. ~ Karen Cirincione









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