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Beware Your Online Presence
Mz6 wrote to mention an article in the NY Daily News stating that an increasing number of employers are Googling their prospective employees during the interview/hiring process. From the article: "'A friend of mine posted a picture of me on My Space with my eyes half closed and a caption that suggests I've smoked something illegal,' says Kluttz. While the caption was a joke, Kluttz now wonders whether the past two employers she interviewed with thought it was so funny. Both expressed interest in hiring Kluttz, but at the 11th hour went with someone else."
I'm glad Mz6 "wrote to mention" an article. Next time it would be helpful if he provided a link to go with the mention.
This guy's the limit!
(by the way, yes I know the html sucks, we're working on a new site that has fully valid code...)
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
On the other hand...
I recently hired two guys based primarily on their online presence.
I was looking for a couple of people to do support. Both of them applied. I googled them. They both had blogs. Their blogs demonstrated that a) they could write well (their jobs involve providing support via email) b) that they had a bit of personality and c) that they were smart people, passionate about Linux (which is our focus).
I hired both these guys without ever meeting them face-to-face. Being able to google them, see what projects they've been involved in, get a feel for how they deal with other people (e.g. in mailing list posts, etc) helped me start getting a handle on them. These guys got their jobs over dozens of other candidates who had great resumes, but were 'invisible' on the web.
--
We're hiring Linux geeks
I know several girls who not only search the web for the name of someone they are considering as a "candidate for marriage" (which is anyone they consider dating) and not only do they do that, they also check the income for previous years which is publicly made available here in the tyrannical covert-government-torturing Norwegian regime. This is not fun to think or write about, but it is a present truth: Girls do (secretly) check your online record AND INCOME. And don't expect them to tell you anything except perhaps "I met someone else". Also, a friend of mine told me that he noticed a printout of his last years taxes lying on the desk in a (rich) girls fathers office and got dumped shortly after.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
This is a very valid point that I haven't heard anyone else mention. Most people tend to use the same (or at least similar) alias wherever they go on the internet. Often times a little digging can provide correlation between a name and online alias. It is sometimes quite amusing what people like to say when they think they are being anonymous.
For example, Googling for my real name will reveal some rather off-color comments about Linux (or Linsux as i called it) as well as many unprofessional rants and raves on mailing lists and usenet. Most of this was from 1998-1999. After that my real name dropped off of the net. Once I realized that these comments could come back to haunt me, I quickly moved all posts under my current alias. Fortunately doing a Google search on my alias returns more hits for a british comic book character than anything I've written with this name. If any employer is willing to go through hundreds of pages of results they can find things that i've said. However, i NEVER put any reference to my alias on any resume, ever.
Scott
There's a significant problem you're ignoring, namely when other people share the same name as you. My name is not extremely common, but a Google search on my name comes up with a lot of stuff that isn't me and could be very harmful to my reputation if it were. Even worse, the other person with my name is about the same age as I am, at least as far as I can tell from the pictures, so it's quite plausible that a potential employer could think that was me.
For a small fee, you can make your voter registration information private.
I didn't know this until recently and was having a lot of GREAT interviews, followed by no callbacks. Changed my party registration and got hired on the very next interview. Coincidence? I think not.
Contact your local County Clerk and have your voter registration information made private TODAY.
My girlfriend played Wow and got a little too cozy with another player. With a little bit of Real World knowledge about him I was able to find out quite a bit about him and his immediate family.
Even dug up a picture that might be of him, she wasn't pleased when I said that as she had never been sent a picture. Seems they weren't that cozy after all.
I'll leave it up to the reader to determine what one can do with such information.
In this case i dumped her, and sent him a message in Wow telling him he should feel free to meet up with her. I've got no interest in her now anyway.
It was rather revealing to toss out information which she knew, but had no idea how I could have found out about. She probably thinks I trolled through all her email, but she seemed really curious as I suspect most of the information passed between them was via Ventrilo (voice chat).
For fun, I Googled myself and my wife. Turns out my wife's a basketball player, a corporate credit services clerk, principal of some elementary school, a movie actress and all sorts of other things, since her name is rather common. No one's going to succeed in performing a background check on her via Google. Maybe 2-5% of the links turned up on Google had anything to do with her. She simply doesn't have a web presence that stands out.
I, on the other hand, have a comparitively significant web presence and a unique name. I get over 9,000 hits on Google, and at least most of the links on the first 20-30 pages are something to do with me personally. I've always been aware that anything I did on USENET or mailing lists was essentially "in public," though, and I have no worries that my web presence will have anything other than a positive impact on any future job search I might have. Not that I intend to leave my employer any time soon.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
"Problem is, once you've made that mistake its nigh impossible to go back and correct it in many cases. When I posted on usenet in the 80's the concept of a usenet archive that might be easily search seemed kind of out there. I think todays kids have a hard time understanding that in a few years they might not be proud of their hard partying lifestyle, etc."
It's a dangeroug message to send out there. Soon, you won't allowed to make any mistakes before the expectation of "pefection" is not met and you can't get a job anywhere. People aren't perfect and all the internet does is to show that. It's a dumb idea to use it to measure people. "Oh my, it's a picture of him giving the finger to someone, let's not hire him." No wonder why people are so uptight and jackasses. All because a small minority that aren't as bright as they might think send a message down to their lackeys look for this stuff. What happened to work being an exchange of time for money, not signing your life away like it's become.
My last employer was a huge crook. "You'll live your life when I let you.". Is the message he sent. Every conference call was a forum for him to stand up and say "I'm better than you because I have money. That's why so and so had no right to talk down to me." Meanwhile he was paying people barely enough to survive on a 1099 though we were employees for work that was $40,000/year at minimum. Meanwhile insulting everyone everyday. Threatening to sue me when I filed unemployment. He fires me for refusing to do unreleated work at another site yet tells the UC that I was "self-employed". My previous employer was even worse. So you could see in my first two jobs out of college I've had the worst of the worst. So, my initial impression is worse than it should be. It's been a battle just to maintain basic dignity.
my surname is unique in the world (afaik) and thus so is my wife's. she is in the news quite a bit as a semi-public figure, and so she has a google alert on our last name to keep track of news coming in that mentions her.
of course she gets "news alerts" when i "digg" something. how retarded is that.
MORTAR COMBAT!
I've been arguing for a long time that completely free and effectively unaccountable speech on-line, particularly when made anonymously, is not necessarily a good thing, and on balance it may do a lot more harm than good. The principled people tend to shout/mod me down, but on this one I think it's the pragmatic view: freedom of speech is not an absolute right, and with that freedom when it does exist must come responsibility for what is spoken. As long as anyone can post anything about anyone on-line without so much as offering any right of reply, never mind (in practice) being subject to the usual legal comebacks in more serious cases, there will be abuses, and the consequences can be very serious, even life-changing. You can argue that the Internet is not a reliable source of information and people shouldn't trust random information for important decisions as much as you like, but in practice it will always cause problems, as we see here.
I've also argued for a long time that archiving of everything on an opt-out basis, as with things like the Wayback Machine and Google Groups, is not necessarily as much in the public interest as the advocates would have us believe. Again, while there is clearly merit in having a record of the general state of the world and useful content that might otherwise be lost, there is also scope for a lot of abuse. Perhaps more seriously, there can be a lot of accidental damage, maybe due to out-of-date information being assumed to be current, maybe because information that was never correct was posted at some stage and later retracted, but the archive didn't pick up the later correction. Of course, it would be best if some information were never on-line in the first place -- quite a lot of it, these days (ask the CIA ;-)) -- and archives that help themselves to content without permission exacerbate this problem, too.
I suspect that in the long run, the abuses will become so great that the fundamental nature of the Internet will have to change. Anonymity will simply not be allowed, with countries not prepared to play along being excluded from the network. Archiving will have to become opt-in. Cross-border regulation will be created to enable people to defend their reputations much more straightforwardly than is the case at present.
It's a shame, but the simple truth is that while the unregulated nature of the Internet has been an advantage in developing it, it has also led to serious problems that, at current rates, will bring about its demise just as fast. I'd rather accept putting my name to my words and standing by my comments than the continued and increasing presence of viruses, spam e-mails, phishing, websites offering incorrect (sometimes dangerously so) information, major crimes like fraud and identity theft being carried out behind the Internet's shield of anonymity, sickos distributing kiddie porn, and all the rest of it. Ultimately, you're never really anonymous on-line anyway, it's just a lot of effort to work out who you. Why continue with the delusion when it does this much damage?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Actually i planned on doing so since it was a signed lease and he had tricked me into handing it to him a day after it was signed. I wanted to persue it in court, however i had far too many things to do that a court case was simply something i didn't have the time or money for.. not to mention the fact that i needed to find a place to live..
MABASPLOOM!
I've got one better for you. When I was a kid, my mother was pulled over by the state highway patrol for a routine check. They radio her info in, and are told that she's been dead for a week.
The reason for this? My aunt (father's sister) who lived in the same town, had the same first name as my mother and had kept her maiden name had passed away about a week before. It was a royal mess to get that sorted out.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
Your writing style leads me to believe that you wrote this book? bookid=10349
http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp
Am I correct?
Not very long ago, I applied for a job doing computer support for a local community college. Everything went well, despite it being a rather "trying" experience, with multiple application forms to fill out, a couple of fairly extensive interviews and a hands-on proficiency test - but in the end, I was verbally offered a position. Then, 2 days later, I got another phone call, informing me that my hiring was being "put on hold" due to some new information that had come to light.
What happened was, I used to run a very popular computer bulletin board system. Almost 10 years ago, it was seized by the FBI under suspicion of copyright infringements occuring on it. After all of my equipment was held hostage for *2 years*, they decided to drop the whole case and give me everything back. A rather sheepish-faced federal agent actually came by my house after work with his station wagon filled up with all of my CDs, computers, monitors, etc. etc. and dropped it all over in my living room - apologizing for the whole incident (but still making me sign some type of waiver promising to absolve them of all responsibility, so I couldn't sue later). I thought this story was worthy of mention on my web site, since to this day, people occasionally ask me what ever happened to the BBS, etc. etc.
Well, the college apparently googled my name, found my web site, and read everything on it. (My BBS story wasn't exactly "top level" material on my site, so they had to click through at least 2 levels of menus and read 4 pages about it before they hit that part.) They were concerned about the incident, despite no charges ever being filed - and denied me employment based on it! (Only 2 days after the phone call telling me they were "reconsidering" hiring me, I got the standard rejection form letter in the mail, signed by the very guy I had just spoken to on the phone!)
Extremely irritating - because while, sure, I could just censor this info - I think it's a story worth telling. And furthermore, I'm not so sure I want to work for an employer who is that paranoid over something that speaks more about government's inefficiency and blundering than my own character.
But in the end, I was hired as I.T. Supervisor of a business paying considerably more than this community college anyway, so maybe everything happens for a reason after all.
... to someone famous. I'm sure an employer would have a hard time digging up your information if your name was Michael Bolton. By luck, my name happens to be the same as a professional baseball player from many years ago, so all my search results are obscure.
But see.. thats the thing. It doesn't matter whether it gets brought up today, or 10 years from now, its all the same.
/.) without actually directly linking this article to my name.
With more and more stuff being in searchable archives, no one will be anon soon.
Btw, thanks for posting my name though. I was being semi-vague for a reason. I gave readers enough info to look it up (and even a hint how to do it if they were not as tech savvy as most on
Now, how long do you think it will be before what you just did is an actionable offense? Honestly... stop and think about it. I think the day is coming quickly.
But hey, I should have figured someone would come along and do that. In fact, regardless of posting someones legal name on a forum being considered "rude" or whatever, it will happen. You just gave the exact example I would have shown.
The creation of another link of my name to that BS Vampire story.
(Obviously I don't care much... it's good to know my name is semi-clean.. but I would not have posted the parent had I really cared about it)
It's great street cred at the goth clubs though. Shame I am not a LARPer.
(The above post was written while I was feeling slightly snarky about a totally unrelated issue. I am not flaming the poster or anything like that... the tone of this post after previewing just seemed a bit toastier than I wanted)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
Well, if the disagreement is the source of conflict between you and your employer, then no you don't want to work for him. You should both be able to cooperate despite having differing views.
This is nothing new: the need to balance personal privacy against our urge to debate with and convince others is as old as parchment, and everyone knows that although Big Brother may not be watching you, he's damned sure reading what you wrote. If your opinions are different than your employer's, your union's, or your loved ones', it's sometimes necessary to publish them without attribution. The most common solution for this problem is to publish anonymously or with a pen name: many of America's most famous authors have done so, and that's what I've been doing for years(1).
On the one hand, having a pen name gives you anonymity for purposes of Google searches, and you can even build a reputation separate from your own under the pen name. Be careful with your other hand, though: not having your name online can backfire when an employer is looking for someone with "street cred" in online circles. As other posters have pointed out, experienced internet users are now climbing the corporate ladders and are making decisions about hiring and promotion: decisions that will be influenced by your online reputation as well as your meatspace personna.
What this boils down to is a short question you should ask yourself: "Am I a nice guy on the net"? You might think the answer is "Of Course!", but a few days of research will often change your self image, just as it did mine, and I made up my mind to be a lot more polite after I read some stuff I'd written years before.
If you're concerned about potential employers knowing too much or too little about you, the first thing to do is look at your own posts, especially old ones you've forgotten about, and ask yourself "If I heard this guy saying this into a cellphone while I'm on the subway, would I look forward to going to work with him"? In other words, you have to read what you've written with a stranger's eyes, and see if the words take on a new meaning.
We all know how easy it is to start flame wars or otherwise give offense, deliberately or not, and that's a fact of online life that I hope future managers will learn to account for when they read things I've written in the past. With that said, I'll also say that there's something about a keyboard and not being face to face that brings out the worst in a small percentage of Netizens: I don't know why, but some Internauts seem to think that the online world is the perfect place to vent their frustrations. This is understandable when you consider the alternatives: many Usenet posts would be grounds for dismissal if seen in a company newsletter, and grounds for divorce if seen by your wife!
Long story short: if you use the net as a safe place to play at being nasty and mean, keep your identity a secret. On the other hand, if you're proud of your writing and of your contributions to the net, by all means sign your name.
1.) In my case, there's a special reason involving a developmentally-dalayed child I don't choose to have potential employers aware of.
Well, as I was saying: the Internet takes away some potential jobs (because they find out things about you they don't like), and it gives you access to a lot of other potential jobs. I think on balance, we all still win, employers and employees.
It was one of my better writing efforts, I was mildly offended that the guy did not credit me just a little for my prosaic abilities. Oh well, the prospective employer went out of business shortly after not hiring me anyway. In retrospect, I wonder if my criticism of AEFA would have been even for this other business.
Things happen for a reason. I'm glad Slashdot came out when it did, or I would never get another shot at firing off a dig against AEFA and the hedonistic blatherskites that infest its tired walls.