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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 ;)
i tried to get a position with the mafia - and i couldn't figure out why it didn't work out. it's all clear now.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
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.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
Mr. Anderson, it does not matter how often you change your persona, you are the only one we know who likes the gay midget goat pr0n.
your name. I happen to have the last name that is the same as the stage name of a popular porn actress, and my first and middle name happen to coincide with the first and last name of a male porn star she frequently stars with. So 90%+ of the stuff that comes up when you search for my name on google is porn......
Monstar L
I went to a job interview and got asked questions that could only have come from a google search. Very dangerous given that my name is relatively common and there is no clear way to know how much they read and attributed to me really was written by me. How much di they read that wasn't brought up in the interview for me to confirm or refute?
You know CmdrTaco, this reminds me of the time I had to go to the doctor to seek advice about a "friend" who got crabs.
I am very tempted just to put that nickname on my resume. Is the professional, albeit technical, world ready for this step?
The professional world can't stand when your real life and their little toy world-of-whoredom intersect in messy ways. When this happens, you hear about people fired for sexual harassment over a coworker uninvitedly reading your personal website or blog.
So, where should you list your online handle(s) on your resume? Nowhere! Thus the whole point of using a handle in the first place... Only an idiot would pretend it gives us true anonymity, but to a casual search for info on you, the two worlds will maintain some degree of separation. You want that effect.
Remember that once you make it to an actual interview, employers don't look for reasons to hire you, they look for reasons not to hire you. Think of it like a driving test where you start with 100 and can only go down... The less you do outside the scope of the test, the better. At your driving exam, did you ask to stop at the local head-shop to pick up some filters?
If you really feel the need to provide some online persona for an employer, make a new one. Create a cute little profile on all the big social networking sites, and post carefully censored historical details of your life.
your nickname is, say, quite common ?
http://www.google.com/search?name=f&hl=en&q=An+anonymous+reader
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
I interviewed with Google once, but for some reason they turned me down...
This guy's the limit!
Absolutley not. I interview a *lot* of people and I have never seen a CV (resume) that lists any nicknames, alter-egos, aliases or anything that would point to the candidate having any kind of online presence. It woud probably count against them if they thought this was important.
I certainly would never follow up any links to online data in a CV.
A lot of countries have anti-discrimination laws. You would be on very sticky ground if you rejected a candidate on the grounds of information you had gleaned online (esp. if it was related to a class of discrimination). For instance if someone's online diary said "I plan to start a family in a year or two" You could not ask this type of question in an interview and if you rejected them by knowing that this was their intention you could end up being sued.
BTW, I'm assuming UK law here.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
What I do online is irrelevant to what I do as a profession and I try to keep them seperated as much as possible.
However I can imagine that it IS relevant for some, especialy if you are a webdesigner or a developer, highly involved in OSS projects. I would just add them as past experience.
e.g. I have developed/designe XYZ under the alias foo@example.com
However you must also provide some proof that you actualy ARE that alias, I would say.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Back in the early 90s usenet was "safe" because everyone knew that it got expired after a week or two. We all used our real names and email addresses too. Then someone found some old backup tapes 10 years later and handed them over to Google.
A friend of mine was quite a good troll back then, but now it haunts him due to his unique name. He's written Google and gotten them to delete his posts, but they won't delete other people's posts that quote him, so he's a bit screwed. I advised him to start posting lots of technical stuff to hopefully flood out the bad crap, and then write off the rest as youthful indiscretion.
Another friend who is now in his 40s got busted and convicted for dealing drugs when he was a teenager and spent a few years in jail. He's absolutely reformed now and eventually got a pardon from the governor of the state he was convicted in. He has no trouble getting a tech job these days -- except for banks. He doesn't even bother applying there.
Also, doing drugs won't stop you from being President these days, saying the wrong thing 20 years ago will.
Moral of the story, do drugs, don't talk shit on the net.
(Gawd, this tongue-in-cheek post is going to come back to haunt me someday I bet...)
Sincerely,
The Goatse guy
If you simply can't hold it in, at least make sure that no individuals or organisations can be identified.
On a resume, or in an interview, the potential employer is interested in what you can do for them, not your personal blog or your views on personal/irrelevant topics (unless they would be incompatible with the position you are interviewing for).
As a consequence, I can see almost no situations where an employee can write about their current or past work in a way that will not compromise their future employment prospects - leave online links out of your CV
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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.
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.
What you do in your spare time really can reflect on your desirability as an employee. I have dealt with extremely productive people who did beautiful quality work but were utterly unreliable, difficult to work with and generally not people you want to have to deal with on a daily basis. In these cases either drugs or possibly psychological issues were often at heart and ultimately made it impossible for them to function over the long term.
Any mature person can tell you that you really don't want naked bong party pictures floating around. Unfortunately young people are by definition not mature.
A silly online nick really would not be an issue for me as an employer provided you DON'T get the goatse guy. It't the content that counts.
The older I get, the more *I* am interviewing *them*. If you have a sense of humor and indulge in some silliness on your offtime you really shouldn't be embarassed. OTOH googling your name produces the goatse picture, you really ought to consider a name change.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
How do you parse the title, when almost each word could either be a verb or a noun? :( And if "Google" is a verb there, why is it capitalized? The answers to these questions still elude me, after minutes of staring at it.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
I use ClaimID to verify what belongs to me online. It's free and let's you add those things online that you authored and also note which items don't belong to you. You can then give your ClaimID URL and annotate your claimed URLs to create an online resume that presents yourself in a more polished way to a potential employer.
What the hell were your parents thinking naming you Rock Hardon Beaver?!
Especially when their last name is Goldstein...
Wow, a hundred comments in and nobody seems to have posted from the employer side of the table. I'll do that.
;-)
It's quite simple. Put your online nickname--if the Google results are flattering. If they're not, then don't. It's really no different from anything else you'd include on your resume. Left a good job on friendly terms? Put that. Perp-walked out of a job in handcuffs? Leave that out. There's not much nuance here: If someone else shares your nickname, and that guy's a dick, you probably shouldn't put your nickname, lest you be put in the position of having to explain his posts. If you use your nickname in porn discussion forums online, leave it out.
On the other hand, maybe your nick links people to logs of great technical discussions you've participated in, on IRC. Or it links to yourself being helpful on a technical mailing list in your field of specialty, or even just yourself showing interest in your field of specialty. For pete's sake, of course you want your employer to see that. As someone who reads resumes and does interviews, that's extremely valuable information to me. I would check it on Google, and I would be interested in what I found there, and if it was positive, I would be strongly leaning toward you before I even picked up a phone to set up the interview.
--
p.s. god I love having a unique name. Thanks to my name and many years of contributions to some high-profile open source stuff, you literally have to go 15 pages deep into Google's results for my name, before you find even a single entry that's not legitimately about me. If I ever have to find another job, I can guarantee you I'll be telling people to Google me.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Thing is we didn't need someone with 6 years of experience,
Then's what was the problem? You lied about what experience you needed , he lied about what experience he had.
So, does it usually help or hurt your job prospects when your interviewer sees the links to porn at the bottom of the page?
I mean, I don't think you can get a job based on the quality of your smutty smutty chicks links.
Collect your online work into your own portfolio and put that online (with the URL on your resume). That way many employers will see your work without all the crap that might show up in a Google search. If they want to Google you anyway then they will and you can't control that, but putting your best work forward might satisfy their curiosity or at least draw a line between what you're serious about and what you've put on the web as part of your personal life. If you give your employer enough information to get a good picture of you, they likely won't look much further. And a portfolio gives you control over what they'll see.
Unique is good.
A profound clash on the net is between "goofing off" and building net credibility. For the occasional snark comment, that's what AC is for. I have put a fair amount of effort into this "brand name" to ensure that it's reasonably respected.
However, I still wouldn't actively disclose it to any employer. I consider it in the realm of private research mixed with entertainment. If an employer needs to know what my successes at work are - let's have them talk to a previous employer! A former manager who liked you is a far better reference than miscellanea on the net.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Mr. Anderson: So what? You played a drag queen in the Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
I suppose it all depends on what your potential employer might find when they Google your nickname.
Have gnu, will travel.
You mean this guy?
...
Mickey E. Suttle is a controversial and infamous self-proclaimed Star Wars fan who posts so-called Star Wars news, images and FAQs on his website, supershadow.com almost every day, using the nickname of SuperShadow. Many of his claims, most notably that he is friends with George Lucas and possesses advanced copies of screenplays, have made him a controversial figure among Star Wars fans.
The Whois service reveals that supershadow.com is owned by Mickey Suttle, of Hickory, North Carolina, who also appears to own a law firm. His location is also stated on FindLaw. [source?] The owner of the SuperShadow.com domain also owns MickeySuttle.com
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Someone, quick, mod him down, in order to fuck with his "net credibility"!