The job hunt in the digital age is more complicated than it used to be. Not only is competition denser with various sites like indeed.com allowing for keen seekers to apply to hundreds of jobs until they receive replies, but the presence of social media accounts incentivize potential employers to snoop around for clues about your work ethic and personality. It used to be that cleaning up your CV and refreshing your answers to the most common interview questions was sufficient prep for snagging your dream job, but nowadays you must be more alert of the information that holds you name on search engine results pages.
Did you participate in university events that promoted drinking behaviour? Is your name slapped across a juvenile blog you made with your best friends at the ripe age of fifteen? Perhaps you should check whether your name or face is attached to any sensitive content before applying for your dream job. Your goal here is to put your best foot forward—both physically and virtually. Don’t let your online persona vary from the character you convey in the interview room.
Online reputation management companies are leading experts in monitoring and managing both individuals’ and companies’ online personas. They have the technological prowess as well as a vast network of bloggers to help burry the bad news that you hope no employer will ever encounter. Individuals and companies on their own cannot take a DIY approach to suppressing bad posts in which the publisher is unknown or difficult to contact. It can take years to sufficiently suppress only one result that has been getting on your nerves. Depending on the contract, our agency can write up to eight in-house articles with the aim of providing enough backlink juice to throw off your pesky results.
Here are a few steps you can take to analyze and ensure that your digital footprint is what you envision it to be:
- Search yourself on Google: This is one of the first things that employers will do when they become serious about hiring you. First try your luck with your first and last name. Afterwards, tack on a few other important keywords that employers are likely to know about you such as the school you attended or the city you reside in.
- Secure a domain name: Since employers will be searching your name, it would be a good idea to buy a domain name consisting of “yourname.com” or any variation of it (.org, .ca etc.). These domain names are most likely to take prominence on Google, therefore pushing down any potential threats to your name and reputation.
- Clean up your social media accounts: Facebook’s privacy settings are constantly changing, therefore any time you are looking for a job you should ensure that your page is optimized on the highest privacy setting.
- Sign up to all social media channels: The worst thing anyone can do when they’re in a reputation crisis is to delete their social media accounts. Winning at this virtual reputation game involves owning as many social networks as possible so that you can adequately control what is being said about you.
All these tips can help you control and monitor the current climate of your online reputation. However, when a disastrous search result rolls around the corner it is best that you let an ORM expert take care of the aftermath. They are fully equipped with state-of-the-art marketing processes that will clean up your reputation and give you total peace-of-mind.