What your online profile says about you

In an age of ever advancing technology, it only seems natural that college admissions officers and companies looking to hire are turning to the web to distinguish potential candidates from one another, and gain a more developed or fuller understanding of the candidate. Thus, the creation of sites such as this become helpful tools for those looking to advance in their careers or education, allowing you to create developed and professional profiles that present an appropriate image of who you are and what you have to offer.

With that in mind, one must consider other avenues of research potential job or admissions officers may consider. When someone "googles" you name, they are presented with a number of hits that reference your name, including your Facebook page, or various photo.com sites where you post your pictures. It is important to consider the image these pictures, their comments and other posts on your facebook profile say about you.

This article presents interesting information with regard to this growing trend: http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20091109/sc_livescience/posting...

While it is ok to maintain a Facebook page upon graduating from college, as more and more business professionals are entering the once college dominated world of Facebook, but it is important to ensure your profile shows people what you want them to see.

In the spirit of this discussion, I wonder what advice people have in regard to presenting a professional image of yourself on the web via Track Ahead, Facebook, etc. as well as other avenues where your name may appear on the web. How do people feel about this modern way of getting a first impression, before your potential employer even meets you face to face? Is this trend taking away from the value of resumes and cover letters?

What are other thoughts?

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Tony Deblauwe on December 17, 2009 at 1:00pm: The reality is recruiters and the general population enter names in Google to find links to online profiles. The importance of a profile that is professional and highlights your story is very important. People make the mistake of thinking nobody has the time to look the postings you leave of potentially damaging pictures or opinions.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Pamme Boutselis on January 19, 2010 at 2:18pm: It's very important to establish the type of online profile that you would want to share with prospective employers, business and community contacts, and those in the educational sector as well.

The bottom line is this: Don't post anything you wouldn't be comfortable sharing with any of the above contacts and your parents as well. If you aren't open to everyone looking at what you have online, then chances are that it's stuff that shouldn't be there.

The other thing to keep in mind is that there may be things out there about you that you did not upload at all, such as pictures you have been tagged in, and other info that people are discussing, using you by name.

You may not know also that various online group discussions (such as Yahoo groups, etc) and even communication to public websites can become public information.

Be sure to Google yourself occasionally and see what's out there online. You may be surprised by what you find. As a freelance writer, my work is often picked up by websites and online publications that I had no clue of, and quite frankly, I am sometimes surprised to be affiliated with in any way. Fortunately, none of them have been nefarious.

As you move forward in your career or schooling, you may be involved in any number of things. You might be surprised to find how long notice some of the things that you were involved with will be available online for others to learn about.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by TrackAheadAdmin on April 26, 2010 at 6:33pm: This article certainly lends itself to this very topic in a big way.

Here at TrackAhead.com, you'll develop the type of online presence that you'll be proud to share using your real name.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Rebecca Roland on April 26, 2010 at 10:23pm: Great article, Mike. You bring up a lot of great points. In this day and age - most people have social networking pages - and it's not a bad thing to have one. The biggest thing that I can stress if you are going to join one is to have strong privacy settings. On my Facebook profile, everything is private to only my friends including my pictures, status updates, etc. If you were not my "friend", the only thing that you can see are my profile picture, some of my page affiliations (so you'll want to be careful what pages you affiliate yourself with), and my current city. I would not recommend making your profile picture something that you wouldn't want your boss or future employer to see. I would also suggest periodically looking through your tagged pictures and speaking to any of your friends who have tagged questionable pictures of you to ask them to remove them.

Another thing that is important to note, is that you should be careful about what you say in your wall comments to friends and or status updates on sites such as Facebook or Myspace. I would recommend staying away from complaining about your job, boss, coworkers, etc. I know somebody who was let go from their job because of some not so nice comments they made about one of their superiors. I would say a good rule of thumb is to not have anything on one of these sites that you wouldn't want your children, parents, grandparents, boss, future employer and so forth to see.

This is why TrackAhead.com is such a great site. You can use this tool to successfully network professionally. You can upload your resume. A great aspect and tool of this site is that you can use the box.net application to upload some of your work (such as papers or projects for school, as well as any works such as photographs or videos that you have produced). My Box.net application has a mock Marketing Plan that I made for one of my Marketing classes as well as my professional resume. I am working on uploading some other projects that I have done for college. When applying for a job (or college) you can give your potential employer (or college) the TrackAhead.com website and they can join to look at your profile and see some examples of your work and what you are capable of!; ▶ Reply to This