Cleaning Up Your Online Profile

Our worst nightmare has come true. Mr. and Ms. Potential Future Employers have sent their hack-crazy IT guys on a mission – find out about us and report back with all the juicy details. Their first target: Facebook. Or MySpace, Friendster, or any other social networking site that has snapshots of us pole dancing topless in red-Solo-cup-double-fisting glory, with the requisite Sharpie marks proclaiming our love for farm animals still legible on our forehead (that was one helluva night, eh?). We shouldn’t have fallen asleep with our shoes on, no, but more importantly we definitely shouldn’t have allowed our kindly friend to post this disreputable version of us on the internet. Think about this: a recent CNET article stated that one in five employers use the internet to research job candidates. But don’t wig too much. We’re all human and employers know that. Going crazy and trying to slash and burn our digital past isn’t necessary. Instead, let’s just see where we stand internet-wise and try to polish our image a bit.

Now is as good a time as any to perform a thorough spring cleaning, so here are some of the places where our names may pop up on the internet, and how we can take control of our online identity:

Social Networking Sites

Jeff Kirsch, Vice President of D.C.-based NGO Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, said that they have recently started to use the internet as a background-checking tool. “We’re not looking for anything specific, but rather seeing if there are any ‘red flags’ that should concern us, or tell us something that should be checked out with the applicant. Raving about drugs and alcohol, for example, would be a problem for us.”

Underhanded? Perhaps. But it does happen, and we can lessen our chances of preemptive elimination with a quick revamp. This site and this list of dos and don’ts have good advice on how to enjoy social networking sites without risking our futures. It helps to review our profiles with the discerning eye of our employer. Don’t just de-tag those incriminating pictures, but also remove questionable wall posts/slideshows. Kirsch elaborates, “Friends complaining that the person is always late or unreliable would make us take notice. And while we probably wouldn’t make a hiring decision just on the basis of something we saw on an applicant’s site, it seems to be another way of getting a fuller picture of an applicant in whom we’re about to invest a lot of time and energy.”

Making a profile private is easy. We all know those irritating MySpacers who we can’t stalk because their profiles are set to private. Well, they’ve got the right idea, and probably the right job, so take a clue – the privacy option is under “account settings”. The only people who will see a private profile are the people we add, and everyone else will just see our pictures, so opt for the fully-clothed shot. On Facebook, the My Privacy tab has a long list of savory anti-stalk options, allowing us to control who can and can’t see every aspect of our profile, or to create a limited profile to display to non-Facebook friends.

Blogs

Some of us use blogs to update the family on our cross-country travels, some of us want friends to see how hot we look in our new jeans, and still others use this new digital phenomenon as an online diary to try and sort out those pesky existential dilemmas (I personally have at least one a week). However we use the blog, be smart about it. For example, if we’re applying for a job with the Wal-Mart Corporation, political rants about the criminal nature of capitalism are probably going to raise a red flag. Same goes for our derisive blog about the “no-talent-ass-clown” in HR who interviewed us for a job yesterday. Search keywords and key phrases that may be an employer turn-off (“lazy,” “late,” “tequila bender,” “Yanni’s amazing new EP,” various curse words) and watch out for spelling and grammar errors.