Online Nicknames Google better than Real?

An anonymous reader writes "I was recently laid off, and during several of the interviews looking for a new job as a mid level IT manager, I was asked "So, I can just Google your name and find some of your work?" The answer is "yes", but searching for my name doesn't really bring up many results compared to searching for my online nickname which I have been using for about a decade. I am very tempted just to put that nickname on my resume. Is the professional, albeit technical, world ready for this step? Where should I put it? At the top or somewhere in the body?" And the other problem- how hard will it be to get a job when your nickname is something ridiculous. Boy I wish I would have thought of that in 95 ;)

Comments

They followed my email address

[Bandman]

My current employer googled my email address, found my LiveJournal and read the previous two years or so of what I'd been writing.

It actually helped them decide to choose me, since there are lots of questions you can't ask in an interview, but reading a LJ gives a more accurate representation of a person, anyway.

Re:They followed my email address

[CastrTroy]

I got a nasty email from ebay when I signed up with ebay@kibbee.ca. Seems they think that simply having the word ebay in your email address makes them think you are trying to impersonate somebody who actually works at ebay. If their users are dumb enough to fall for that one, they have bigger problems than people with suspicious email addressed.

Re:Only let them see what you want

[nahdude812]

One time we had an applicant who gave us a few direct links to his stuff on his resume. Unfortunately (for him) some of his stuff had a pretty unique nickname attached to it (I seriously doubt two people would have had the same handle). Googling that handle helped us find other info on him. Including a blog entry from 3 months back talking about how he was just starting to learn a core technology which was *completely* necessary for the position we were hiring for (ColdFusion - don't shoot me, I just worked there). Problem was that his resume listed 6 years of experience with it, which his blog totally disagreed with.

Digging deeper it turned out that some of what he had listed as example applications that he claimed he wrote were just someone else's pre-canned scripts which he made some tweaks to before putting online. We didn't hire him, but it didn't stop him from applying with us several more times. I wanted to interview the guy and ask him why his blog and his resume disagreed, but I guess my boss just figured it was a waste of time toying with someone who lied to us out of the gate. Thing is we didn't need someone with 6 years of experience, we actually would have preferred someone with 3 months of CF experience since we were trying to hire someone to get the many day-to-day small scale maintenance work (static web content updates and the like) off the shoulders of the core application developers.

Re:Glad I thought ahead.

[TobyRush]

I've got a reasonably unique name, and I decided a while back that using it as my online name is a good way to keep myself honest and avoiding the temptation to do something stupid.

I say "reasonably unique," of course... there is actually another person I know of with my same first and last name; he's the CEO of an RFID company in Kansas. I've always thought of contacting him, but I was actually born in Kansas (moved away when I was 3) and there's that tiny fear of finding out that he's me.