I saw an interesting post on the Personal Branding Blog last week, written shortly after the Michael Phelps cannabis story. It referred to a “Google CV”.
What’s a Google CV? I’m not sure Dan Schawbel actually coined the term, but on his site it’s referred to as
“A Google CV is the Google search results page returned for a name search.”
There have been countless cases of the impact of the negative Google CV, people sacked for something said on facebook etc. But I suspect the more savvy HR departments and employers will start to use the online you more positively and begin to complement your paper CV with your Google CV. So just as you take time to prepare your paper CV, maybe now is the time to take a look at your Google CV and make sure it’s one that you want to show a potential employee?
So here are 6 tips for maintaining your Google CV
- Unless you’re quite confident that your non-work persona is perfect for the workplace AND that your social network of friends fulfil the same criteria, then create a dual online personality.
- Get at least two email addresses (make sure they’re not both from your own domain!!), one for signing up the professional you to social sites and one for the personal you. Most social sites use the concept of a “friend searches” that use email addresses.
- Make sure your online presence is up to date. And unlike your paper CV that is gathering dust, keep it up to date. A two year old Lined In profile with 1 connection may send a wrong impression.
- Use Google itself and services like 123people to look at the online you, find all those sites you’d forgotten you’d signed up to and tidy up those you don’t want people to find!
- Obvious one, for those personal social sites (facebook, bebo, myspace), lock them down to your friends. Here’s a great post on facebook privacy.
- Get the professional you on LinkedIn or other similar social sites, set yourself up a blog related and/or contribute to online forums that relate to your field of expertise. Basically heighten the chance of that HR person finding the professional polished you on Google!
If you’ve any more suggestions why not post a comment?
Online reputation management for lawyers is becoming more and more important. The horror stories about lawyers suffering from bad online-rep. management continue to grow see: http://tinyurl.com/cdjxf9.
Ignoring what’s going on online is simply not an option anymore.
Great tips and agree that an updated LinkedIn profile is an absolute must.
The candidate may also want to ask colleagues for recommendations on LI – another source of 3rd party validation.
Of course sometimes increased LI activity can be suspicious to a current employer, so be mindful of this!
one of the main issues with linked in I have found is that reccomendations etc can be canned by hr policy, what this means is that people who wish to comment on people are sometimes unable to do so, this.. in my view makes linked in reccomendations dubious as some reccomendations may never appear as people are curtailed from writing them.