Tony McChrystal is the Director of ReputationDefender EMEA and an expert in online reputation management, personal digital privacy, public relations, crisis management and corporate communications. This article will explore how an individual’s online reputation can affect their job opportunities.
For businesses and professionals alike, online reputation is incredibly important. For someone seeking a new role, the way they are portrayed online can have a critical impact on their employment prospects, with 70% of employers checking social media profiles and 69% Googling applicants as part of the candidate screening process according to a 2017 CareerBuilder study.
Furthermore, the study revealed that 54% of employers admitted to deciding against hiring a particular candidate due to content they discovered about that person on social media. The issue is particularly thorny for jobseekers aged between 16 and 24, with 10% losing out on job opportunities due to their activities on social media.
Even once recruited, employees are still not safe from scrutiny, with the same CareerBuilder study also showing that 51% of employers continue to monitor the social media posts of current employees to check that they are not disclosing confidential or proprietary information or conducting themselves in an undesirable way, such as harassing colleagues or otherwise breaking the law.
With job seekers and employee’s online activities under surveillance, it is crucial for professionals to ensure that their online reputation reflects them at their best. ReputationDefender works with businesses of all sizes as well as private individuals, providing online reputation and digital privacy solutions to control the spread of personal information and ensure that its clients are portrayed in an accurate and favourable light.
The first step to an individual taking control of their online reputation is finding out what others see when they search for them online. To do so, it is important for them to log out of their browser before Googling their name to avoid the results being influenced by their search history. Adding additional information, such as city or occupation, can help to narrow the search results down.
By searching for candidates online, most employers are not actively seeking to find negative information about the applicant. Rather, they are trying to verify the credentials quoted on the applicant’s resume and weigh up whether they will be a good fit for the company. For professionals who do discover negative or defamatory content about themselves online, there are several channels available to get that content taken down or displaced.
