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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."
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.
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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.
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!
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.
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.