It is not news that people go to the Internet first for information on just about anything these days. But it may be news to some that this includes recruiters, hiring managers, and just about anyone else who is trying to locate talent for their businesses and organizations.
About 90% of all recruiters and 50% of all employers perform web searches before making a hiring decision. If you are trying to find a new job, transition to a new career, or seek new business opportunities you need to have a presence online. Can you imagine anyone in 2011 making a claim of professional greatness and not being found online? It is unimaginable.
Your digital footprint refers to all the web information there is about you out there. It can come from many places, including social networking media, profile and biography pages you may have established on your own or that exist on employer and association web sites, blogs, forum and message board postings, chats, and even political or religious contributions that you have made. Even if you are committed to not being online, it is hard not to find yourself there somehow.
If you are serious about regulating your digital footprint — and you should be — there are five things to strive for:
- Your presence should exude self-confidence and be in multiple locations.
- A positive professional image should be displayed.
- A consistent and keyword rich value proposition should be present across all platforms.
- A clear and memorable career brand should exist.
- There should be no digital dirt or negative unprofessional content about you found in searches.
Above all, never assume that anything you write or post online is anonymous.
Begin regulating your online presence by seeing what it looks like now. Google yourself in quotation marks and find every reference to you on the first three search ranking pages. Assess what is being shown about you. Is it positive or not?
It is highly probable that you are sharing your name with others. Note how often this happens. You may even find that old information once confined to paper has now been converted to digital format and is available online.
Now that you have a baseline, get started managing. There are three fundamental steps to establishing a digital footprint that you control:
- Have a well written resume with a distinct value proposition that serves as your image anchor.
- Build a basic online by completing profiles on Google Profiles and ZoomInfo.
- Set up a business networking presence by having active accounts with LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
All the above-mentioned websites are SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rich meaning that they will rank high during web searches.
There are additional sites and features to consider opening accounts with such as MyWebCareer, Google Alerts, Reputation.com, Vizibility, Ecademy, and BrazenCareerist. Taken together these will give you a lot of power to control your cyber appearance.
Some management techniques to know when using these sites include:
- Fill your profile with tangible competencies.
- Be aware of the privacy settings, set them accordingly, and check them frequently for usage changes.
- If sharing a name with someone, differentiate yourself, such as “John A. Smith, Senior Marketing Executive”.
- Use headshots taken by a professional photographer.
- If you cannot remove digital dirt, then bury it by creating enough multiple positive presence points that the bad stuff gets lower search rankings.
- Untag yourself from friends’ Facebook tags.
Follow these suggestions and you will be well on your way to managing what the online world will learn about you. And you don’t have to be a control freak to want or need that level of self-authority.
