Controlling Your Digital Footprint
Increasingly, employers and recruiters complete online searches and view profiles to obtain information about potential employees. While they want insight into the “overall you,” you want to make sure that the digital version they find of you is a positive one.
Complete the following steps in order to identify what information is available to a recruiter looking to learn about you through an online search and to improve your Online Self!
Open up a web browser.
Go to your favorite search engine.
Type your name in quotation marks into the search field and push enter.
If nothing comes up or hits are about someone else, you may need to try different searches, including your full name, first name middle initial and last name, or first name last name and a qualifier (location, field, etcetera).
Play around with your search to expand your hits and see what may be hiding in plain sight.
Review your hits.
Take note of positive and negative representations of you.
Take note of hits you can have altered. Does an unflattering Facebook image come up because a friend tagged you? You can delete the tag and change your settings so that you can’t be tagged without your approval.
Does a company still list you as an employee? You can request that they update their webpage.