Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Is an Online Identity Important When Searching For Technical Jobs?
First time accepted submitter quintessentialk writes "I'm looking for a new engineering job. I'm in my early 30s, and have a degree and some experience. I don't have an online presence. Does it matter? Is a record of tweets, blog posts, articles, etc. expected for prospective employees these days? What if one is completely un-googleable (i.e., nothing comes up, good or bad)? Though I haven't been 'trying' to hide, I only rarely use my full name online and don't even have a consistent pseudonym. I don't have a website, and haven't blogged or tweeted. I'm currently in a field which does not publish. Should I start now, or is an first-time tweeter/blogger in 2013 worse than someone with no presence at all?"
What do you do do?
If you're in IT especially and you're invisible you're suspicious. Lots of job applicants. What makes you stand out?
If you're a programmer looking for your next gig, having a slew of projects you've developed or worked on show up in Google can definitely help. Having lots of red party cup drunken pictures with your friends on a blog somewhere, however, will definitely hurt you.
If your technical job requires a TS or above clearance, it is best ot have very little presence. Party life or drug refrences in your posts will work against you in your background investigation for the clearance.
The truth shall set you free!
Frankly, any company that expects any given hire to have an extensive record of blog posts and tweets is not one I would really want to work for.
Not just because of the privacy implications, but because, in my view, that's expecting me to have a particular kind of personality: one that feels compelled to share everything, or at least a frequent chunk of what I do and think.
Unfortunately, this is just another manifestation of extroverts running most organizations and not even truly comprehending what it might be not to be an extrovert. So much of the hiring process and expectations in the workplace are centered around things that give extroverts a charge, but drain introverts' energy badly.
Just one of my big pet peeves X-P
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
I think your social media silence says quite a lot about what kind of person you are. If I were looking for someone to keep the company's secrets, it'd be you.
There are two choices for online presence that makes sense to me:
- avoid it completely
or
- use it only as a self-marketing tool. Only blog/tweet about technical stuff, no politics, current affairs, funny pictures. Only use social networks that bring value to you. I use LinkedIn, but it might be not useful for everyone. Always assume that whatever you put there is public, even if it says "private". Ignore trolls. Praise other projects freely, but be reluctant to post negative opinions. In general, be constructive.
what kind of a name do you have that 'nothing' comes up?
I have never been asked about imaginary friends in job interviews. Am I missing something?
You WILL be Googled. So I'd recommend at least having _some_ online presence. At least LinkedIn, which for technical people is pretty much a CV of what you have been doing over the past few years.
Not having a Facebook and such is actually a plus in my eyes.
Honestly, you're better off without an online presence. Unless the company is looking to hire a full time blogger, if they do an internet search at all, it will only be to find out if there's any reason why they shouldn't hire you.
Should I start now, or is an first-time tweeter/blogger in 2013 worse than someone with no presence at all?
When you begin blogging / posting is fairly irrelevant, but someone posting when they have nothing to say is definitely worse than having no online presence.
I'm in a similar situation. I'm in my late 30's, self-employed, and get most of my work (projects and contracts) by networking in the old-fashioned sense - phoning contacts every once in a while, taking people out to lunch, keeping in tough with agents and hiring managers. Lately though, many of the people I maintain relationships with in this way are increasingly asking for my website / linkedin / facebook details.
I'm not a fan of any of the major social and business networking sites, as I don't necessarily wish to be publicly associated with everyone I know. Perhaps I'm just old-fashioned (I am almost 40 years old, after all), but having bought in to the "share everything online" mentality on the AOL chatrooms in the mid 1990's, and having run a personal website from then until the early 2000's, I soon realised that too many people had easy access to my personal information, and retreated from these services.
Now I'm in the process of setting up an online personal presence for the first time in a while (I have a company website which is fine for my existing clients). I've decided to shun LinkedIn and Facebook as I don't trust their privacy policies, so I'm going with a blog instead. I had been about to start coding my personal website from scratch, but I've decided to use Wordpress for now, and see how I get on with it first. I figure if I can write my own plugins for WordPress to get my pages looking the way I want them to, then I have the benefit of any security updates to the WordPress Codex.
Like the original submitter, I'm keen to see what other people's opinions are on this matter.
Philosopher (n) - a wise person who is calm and rational; someone who lives a life of reason with equanimity
Nobody's going to even look. All we care about is can you do the job. The only exception is if the job is in marketing, then they may care about your use of social media.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
.
An exception would be if the applicant links to his professional online presence in the CV. Then I would use that as I would any other information on the CV. However the presence on the web does not make the information different than having the same information on the CV.
If I were hiring for a sensitive position where a background check is warranted, then I would do a real background check.
But if no background check is required, why go poking around in someone's private life.
Having just sifted through about 100 CVs to find 5 of 6 potential candidates for a senior programmer opening let me fill you with some tips:
* First and foremost: do not pad your CV with things you barely know just to qualify. It's one thing if you used both MS SQL Server and MySQL interchangeably in your past employment but if you used exclusively SQL Server for the past 3 jobs and the requirement is "experience with MySQL" do not apply. Including "experience with MySQL" to trigger the keywords will be an indicator of desperation and lack of professionalism
* About the original question (online presence): it is detrimental unless you are world renowed in your field. Bruce Schneier can point to his online body of work but if yours consists only in presence in Facebook groups, an occasional post on some majordomo list for your pet language or, heavens forbid, a Linkedin account just ommit it. It won't get read and if it does, more likely than not it will show a side of you that would be better hidden.
* The only valuable online presence is a portfolio. Websites you were part of the development team if you area applying for a web developer position, website for the product or service you helped to create, anything that can prove the quality of your work and your qualifications.
* Last but not least important: hiring in this field is mostly about word of mouth and references. The first thing many companies do when trying to find someone qualified is to ask the current employees "do you know someone you can vouch for this position?" That is the surest way to get to the shortlist, to have someone to vouch for you by name.
Last, a little rant. Lucky for us Slashdot got bought by Dice so most of the "infomercials" are in form of people getting and giving advice about employment. Imagine if they had been bought by Sony or Microsoft, it would be a lot like when "jumptheshark.com" got bought by TV Guide only to be dismantled and destroyed.
An exception is if you have a website where you show some of your projects. It can work as a portfolio.
But yes, if we are talking about some silly social media profiles or blogs, don't bother writing some dummy content, if you aren't passionate about that kind of media otherwise.
I considered the same thing a few months ago then backed off to rethink what I was trying to accomplish. Mainly because of the fear of screwing up, if you do mess up somehow there's no way back. That's obviously bad for a teenager in high school, it's in another league for a professional trying to advance his career.
What I realized was that creating a presence isn't necessarily an all-or-nothing affair. It's simply ranking by what could get out of hand. Meaning that on a scale of 1-10, Linkedin is targeted toward professionals so probably an 8, the Google circle thing is maybe a 5, Twitter is a 2 and Facebook is a zero.
My checklist ended up focusing on these four things:
- Controlling the blend of professional and personal information that gets out. The information you expose shouldn't allow one to divine your political views.
- How much of what you expose is tied to other people's social stuff. For example, could a retweet be misinterpreted or someone posting something offensive on your Facebook wall.
- Working it backwards, what would you like Google and Twitter to show then try to craft that. It's worth looking at what other people's profiles look like and use it as a template.
- How much time is going to be required to maintain my "social garden". Obviously the fewer services the better but only if they're worth the hassle.
(Btw, in the end I said screw it and decided to think about it some more)
I find myself in a similar situation. I am looking for a new job. I have never had time for an online presence, but an heavily foul-mouthed person, who shares my uncommon name, does. Worse, we're about the same age. Without looking like a nut job, how do I put on my resume that I am NOT that guy?
Not a single police force has tried to hire me since I started using medical marijuana. Just try to get a pilot's license! Oddly, if you drink, they'll trust you not to fly drunk but if you use medical marijuana they won't trust you at all.
I work for a well-known technical company with tons of both open-source contributions and projects we've open-sourced ourselves; we have a techblog, and a presence in many conferences.
When we look at someone technical, we see if they have a presence online. That doesn't mean Twitter or Facebook -- we really don't care about them unless they're public and inappropriate -- but contributions to OSS, technical blog posts, talks, etc. If it's there, it may make us somewhat more interested.
That said, I have a few engineers working for me who are similarly Google-invisible, and who have no interest in creating OSS, speaking at conferences, or writing blog posts. That's not a problem. They weren't penalized when we interviewed them, and they're not penalized now.
I suspect that a company, given the choice between a famous engineer and a non-famous engineer who are equally qualified, may be biased to hire the famous engineer (in my company, we'd just hire both), so I suspect it's an informal edge, not an explicit expectation (most of the time).
have a degree does not all ways helps in IT and CS is not IT Not helpdesk / desktop NOT sys admin and so on.
As a new engineer, my lack of online presence didn't matter to the company that just hired me. I've always made a point of trying to obfuscate whatever I do, and that hasn't seemed to bother anyone I've ever applied to. I have yet to even get any requests for 'social media sites I use' or anything of that nature.
If anything they'd check a 'professional networking site' like Linked-In, but that'd be about it.
So, no it doesn't matter, and stay away from companies where it does. The last thing we need is for society to accept that snooping is 'good' or 'expected'.
"Our goal each year should be to increase the number of goals we set for ourselves!"
I'm a zOS Systems Programmer and one of my most used resources is the IBM-MAIN mailing list. If you can find one in your field that you can contribute to, your name will become a searchable item.
I pay scant attention to resumes, except as a starting point and a way to see if you can string words together in a syntactically correct manner. Not having an online presence won't hurt you necessarily. After the receiving a resume the first thing I'll do is to google you to see if you have:
I use this information to prepare for the technical interview, and make notes to call you out on your experience and listed skills. If you walk the walk it will show through in your online presence, face-to-face and pairing interview.
Not having these things is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if you're fresh out of college, but having them lets you tell your story. Not to mention that if you have any length of experience I'd be suspicious if you didn't engage in at least some of these activities.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
Then I can assure you do have a presence already.
none
Unless you're applying for a job that requires security clearance (no presence might be good) or a marketing/PR/public-facing position (having a presence is good), it's really only going to be used to screen people out. If a Google search turns up a red flag about someone else with the same name, you might want to create a LinkedIn profile for yourself to SEO your results and easily distinguish yourself from your negative doppleganger. Recruiters are also using LI much more frequently now to look for talent, so it can't really hurt to have a profile. You might get some leads. Other than that though, there's not much reason to go out and create a presence just for your job search. It's only going to hurt you if you post something a recruiter or hiring manager doesn't like and you're not going to get many brownie points for a post they do like.
If I told you, I'd have to ki&/@.;
n o c a r r i e r
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
For the last round of hiring my company did, it was strongly suggested that any applicants open a Github account so they can use it to save the code they wrote for our evaluation. Having a Github account can give software-oriented people a chance to publish any projects they've written, akin to a portfolio for graphics design artists.
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
At a previous job, my employer required all employees to have a page on Facebook and we were all supposed to "friend" the company's corporate page. I told them "Fire me if you like, I refuse to join Facebook." Worked there for quite a while, and never got called out on it. I did, however, have to list any on-line communities I was part of in my "Disclosure and Background Check Release" to get my security clearances. They told me I had to stop posting in the sci-fi discussion group I was a member of. While that was a small price to pay for an amazing paycheck doing something I enjoyed, I thought it was a little draconian.
With their complete dropping of the Facebook requirement, I wonder if I'd have called their bluff if they would have done anything.
Yea, maybe things are different in Silicon Valley when applying to tech giant companies, but 'round these parts up here in Canada, no one cares what you do online. It's assumed that everyone uses Facebook and no one uses Twitter and anything else? No one cares.
If you like offer your master/phd thesis for download on a homepage, and a complete list of your skills. That is what I like to find for possible new colleagues. Anything beyond that does more harm than good IMHO for technical jobs. I work as a consultant and my employer needs people who can work behind the scenes, without bragging about it and solve some problems which require understanding/listening more than talking/broadcasting. Social media usage may be good if you want to go to an interenet marketing job or viral campaign manager, but lets face it:
If you have too many friends on facebook or ask stupid questions on the wrong platform, or provide your idea of demo-code, it means you have too much time. 100 friends on facebook and 1000 posts or questions on stackoverflow do not help you gettign a job done. Unless you can provide really high-profile answers, save your time. Post relevant things, keep political or religious or ideological things out of it, and only post about things you are really good at.
Document your pet projects (which reflect what you really like to do) on your own website with a distinctive name (sort of personal branding). It may take years to find but at some point you might find a job description which is a perfect match. When applying for the job refer to your own website to substantiate your skills.
In my, "About You" section, I include this statement: "To prospective employers: This is my personal wall and has absolutely no reflection on how I perform my job. Shame on you for peeking. Now, get back to work evaluating me as a future employee, please."
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
A while ago I made the decision to separate my solid technical stuff (which includes this Slashdot account) from the fuzzier edges of my online presence (political crap, fandom junk, Cheezburger.) And these are also separate from my public presence (which includes Facebook and my LinkedIn account.) Employers only get the technical handle and the public presence.
Nothing says you can't create an online presence from scratch, and make it a safe, clean one. Follow only cool people on Twitter and post only boring things and safe retweets. Start a blog and post nothing but links and discussions to boring tech articles. A one month old blog without any followers is less of a red flag to some employers than no blog at all.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
let me guess, the company was FOX?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
There are reserved domains for just that purpose. This isn't a whoosh - this is one of those moments where you initiate direct eye contact and say, "REALLY?!"
It was an otherwise informative comment which will get down-voted, so I'll re-phrase with a word of caution.
Does the other guy have a website, and work in a different profession? If so, create your own simple page with your CV, and put a note near the top "Looking for K. Ackle of Loudmouthville, TX? Click [here]".
But be careful not to appear to be linking to someone who is simply more popular than you - so choose a brief way of implying he's just a different person, not that you constantly get messages from people trying to contact him and are annoyed by it. It's a very thin line, and your circumstances will dictate what is best to use.
I think you're confusing professional presence with general presence. Having a blog where you post solutions you've found, posts of IT-related articles, links to a StackOverflow profile, and GitHub contributions would be great (these are just examples, not a check-list and not valid for any/all "IT" professions). Your employer doesn't and shouldn't give a damn about your twitter or facebook. Even better, in states where they can ask for your password, it's even better to not have one at all! Or make a FB profile that has nothing but a nice profile picture and the most locked-down settings FB allows you to have.
While I don't hire people very often (6 in the past 6 years), for what it's worth: I have NEVER checked an applicant's online presence. Unless you're applying for a job at a social network type of company, it should be irrelevant.
That's something you realize as time goes on, or at least should. Life is horribly short, and often times other people's will be cut even shorter. Throwing away time with the people you love in order to be behind a desk too much is about the stupidest thing one can do. Better to be unemployed for a small time than to lose a decade into overtime.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Well, no one in the high tech field will likely hire you. You're still on dialup.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Necronomical Linguistics?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
...without an online presence , I would say you fall into the 'Control Group' ;-)
Sure, a portfolio for a web designer type position is very useful. But they aren't checking to see how often you tweet or what your facebook status is- they're checking how pretty you can make a website and how clean the html is. Not quite the same thing as an online identity.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
First of all, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I don't work in IT or software so some of the specifics don't directly apply, but the generalities do. The biggest clarification I need to make though is by 'online presence' (with my examples of webpages, blogs, and tweets) I didn't mean social chit chat or tools like facebook. I meant 'having a history of making topical posts that are well received by an audience'. If a twitter feed, it would be a journalistic twitter feed, not a 'what I ate for breakfast' twitter feed. The argument (as it has been made to me) is that regularly generating content, and maintaining an audience, shows that you are an active member of your field, and that your ideas have some influence. Especially given that my current work is bound by NDA (no portfolio, no publications, vague resume) having something outside of that would be useful -- but I can't create a reputation ex nihlo. And, since I'm an engineer and not a journalist, it might not matter that much anyway.
I *might* do a search of technical forums to see what kind of tech questions and answers my applicant is giving / asking.
Let's get real here... Would you actually hire someone who isn't maintaining some kind of presence on StackOverflow, Github, or some open source pet project(s)? (Fwiw, Google head-hunts engineers based on the latter.)
No important at all. Not sure where the idea came from, maybe some professions are so easy for anyone to get into that having an online persona is needed for some differentiation? Who knows. If you're a technical person, you're capacity to accomplish tasks and your personality are what's important. Here's a very recent article on what Google looks for, and even they're forced to admit that their infamous brain-teaser questions are pretty worthless. Everyone gets it now. It's your ability that counts. Read this http://www.inc.com/issie-lapowsky/5-surprising-facts-how-google-hires.html .
If anything, companies are starting to get super picky about who they're hiring because no one can afford to hire lazy, shiftless, indifferent, talentless people any more (and these folks outnumber the stars considerably.) In an interview at a smart company, if the interviewer gets any hint from an applicant that they're unreliable, unintelligent, or difficult to work with - they're toast before the interview is done. A quick email from the interviewers to the decision makers during the interview settles everything quickly so that no more time is wasted and they can move on to the next person.
Forget online personas and social networking. Want to be treated right? Bring your A-Game every day to the office and when you're interviewing.
Also, by the way, if you don't have an "online presence", you're lucky. I would start a smoking habit before having an online presence. Don't use your real name online and always behave like your real name is stamped on everything you post.
After I'd been online for 20 years or more, I got hired to do a job doing refactoring and computerization of the control system for the motorized doors in a working jail. This required a certain amount of poking-around to make sure that I was a trustworthy person, if for no reason other than potential contraband issues.
One day, after I'd been working on the project for a couple of weeks, the person responsible for vetting me says "Hey, Adolf: Did you know what when I google your name, nothing comes up?"
I said "Yep. And I'm not surprised, either."
And that was that. No big deal, even though as Chief Technical Lackey of the project I might have been expected to have some mention of me somewhere.
Why was I so invisible? Because I just never, ever bothered posting something under my real name, and I stay away from real trouble and out of the news.
Not that I don't write entire volumes of text on /. or flame away on various forums (and once upon a time, Usenet -- which is forever). I just never wrote any of it as me.
Why would I?
Why should I?
Now, granted: I don't hide very hard. The Gmail address above is easily connected to me by the right entities, if they're so-inclined, but chances are good that I'm not hiding anything from those particular snoops anyway....
Kid-proof tablet..
>> They told me I had to stop posting in the sci-fi discussion group I was a member of.
I many states, that is illegal. YMMV.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Just started a new job as a sysadmin. The boss actually hired me over the other candidate because I knew how to hide my info online. All he could find was my LinkedIn. He praised me for being able to hide my other social networking, blogs, etc.
You're kidding, right?
I don't know of a single HR department looking for a serious (ie non-trivial) hire that DOESN'T at least google the person's name to see what comes up.
I'd say to the OP that it's unlikely you're EXPECTED to have such a presence pre-job. (If you're in marketing, etc they'll probably want you to develop one but in their context, not your own anyway...) I will say that insofar as I can tell, the general impact of already HAVING such a presence is often negative only because your pre-professional behavior can often not be, well, professional.
That said, I've seen that some HR departments are growing more enlightened, and recognizing that a dull/lackluster online presence DOES say volumes about your self-control and discipline.
-Styopa
Nope, not kidding. I've never googled a prospective employee. I don't know anyone who has. I wouldn't trust the results if I did- how do I know its not someone else with the same name? I certainly don't care about their facebook or twitter feeds- even if I did for some reason do it, I'd just be checking technical sites.
If they specifically mention a site on their resume I may visit it, but that would be the limit.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I consider facebook and twitter to be personal-social, not business. Linkedin is for business. It is where recruiters in many industries are looking for candidates. They troll profiles and the appropriate groups. They also post jobs in the groups. My linkedin profile is unusually thorough, with dozens of project entries, but as a result is producing very much on-target contacts from recruiters. http://www.linkedin.com/in/dakra
Somebody from Nigeria asked me to mentor him towards certification in something. I was concerned that maybe this would turn into a scam or my electronic interactions might end up with an inbound malware payload. By googling him I found his interactions and comments on other people's blogs and emedia columns going back several years. The name, id match, and content gave me the confidence that he was both bona fide and an experienced practitioner.
I am sure there are blogs, columns, help sites, and discussion groups in your field. Participate. You'll get ideas and contacts. Of course, if your industry doesn't publish because it is covert, for good or for bad, that is another story. ;-)
As someone involved in hiring engineers sometimes - tweets, no. At least in my field, social media is pretty much a convenience thing: if you use it to keep in touch with people, fine, but it wouldn't cross my mind to look at your twitter profile to judge your hireability. You don't _need_ a blog, but a long-standing blog with thoughtful posts on engineering issues would obviously be a plus for a candidate. If it was screamingly obvious you'd just started one while you were applying for work and were trying to tailor it to look good for potential employers, though...well, I suppose it would at least show you were making an effort.
really, when you're looking for good engineers you're looking for the whole identity. I don't think it's a big problem if you're not Google-able: you just need to make sure you provide some good supporting information to potential employers directly. Provide extensive samples of code you've written, first of all. Ideally, provide entire repositories complete with history, to prove that you understand how to work with source control properly. At least for me, I'm not checking off a list of 'current buzz technologies' you're involved with, I just want to know if you're someone who understands how to write good code in a co-operative way.
"I'm looking for a new engineering job. I'm in my early 30s.."
Stop. They hate you already.
they would not be obliged to release those improvements
But there might still be a value proposition in doing so because one who keeps improvements secret rather than contributing them upstream must port the improvements to each new upstream release.
Most business software would only be useful to somebody in exactly the same line of business
Then keep what you release generic. Software to interact with, say, eBay or Amazon APIs would be useful to people who sell products in other industries. For example, if Phil's Hobby Shop were to distribute its eBay code as free software, companies that sell product lines other than R/C cars and model trains would benefit. The only really hobby-specific code would be that for interacting with distributors.