Auditing Your Online Presence - Could Your Facebook account cost you a job?

In these harsh economic times with more and more applications for each and every role it is vitally important that you think about your online digital footprint.

Before you even start an online job search you should “google” yourself in both web results and image searches to see if anything unflattering is returned. If you find anything you wouldn’t want an employer to see then make sure it is taken down. The ability to track a digital footprint does depend on a number of things, if you have a fairly common name and live in a big city then it maybe be harder to find you. However a prospective employer armed with your CV, which normally has current and former places of work and educational details, can make a fairly good stab at finding you.

Many firms and recruitment agencies now employ people to trawl through cyberspace looking for information on potential new employees. Those stag or hen weekend photos on facebook? Are they really something you want your new boss to see? The rather cutting blog post about your old firm won’t do you any favours. You should think about possibly closing down or at least suspending your social networking accounts while you are job hunting or at least making them clean and family friendly – or use a different name! Make sure you tie down your privacy settings so that only friends and family can view your personal content. One of the issues with something like facebook is that you cannot control what your “friends” put on their pages. A prospective employer may have a quick scan through them to get a feel for your social life. Nothing to hide then fine but can any of us really claim that?

This You Tube video nicely sums up my thoughts on the issue.

Michelle Jones - online recruitment ©