Your Social Media Footprint
This is the fourth article in a series on Jobseekers and social media. Make sure to check out the other three articles: What is Twitter?, What can Twitter Do for Job Seekers?, and my interview with TweetMyJOBS Founder and CEO Gary Zukowski.
Your social media footprint follows you everywhere you go. Do you know where it leads? Do you know how it’s being used? Do you know how to maintain it?
Ego Searches
Companies are smarter than ever. Many hiring managers are doing Google searches on candidates before bringing that individual in for an interview. That makes it important for jobseekers to know where their name is and how it’s being used.
An Ego search can help that.
An Ego search is when an individual types their name into a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or Bing and looks through the results. It’s the digital equivalent of staring at oneself in the mirror.
Your Footprint
As companies and hiring managers become savvier, they’re realizing that references (like the ones we submitted a few years ago) are less useful than what they can find with your social media footprint.
It’s difficult sometimes to remember that everywhere we go and everything we write on the Internet carries with it the opportunity to be read at any point in time. Many social media sites are archiving our status updates. So vigilance in what we post to these tools is key.
The culmination of all the Facebook status updates, tweets, forum posts, discussions, and publically archived emails is what we call our social media footprint. It’s where we’ve been and the mark we left.
Who is John Doe?
So if I, as a hiring manager, want to learn about John Doe, how am I going to use his social media footprint to do that?
First I’m going to look at LinkedIn and see if we know common people. Then I’m going to take those common people and figure out where they interacted with John. From that, I’ll choose one or two people whose opinions I trust and biases I understand and ask them what their thoughts are on John.
Notice, I’m not using the recommendations on LinkedIn. That’s not to say they’re irrelevant, but John’s recommendations were likely requested from people John knows will give him a “thumbs up”.
Additionally, LinkedIn introduced a feature at the end of 2009 where users can link their Twitter accounts to their LinkedIn accounts. Guess which hiring manager is now following John on Twitter with a fake Twitter account!
The Other John Doe’s
When hiring managers do go looking to find John Doe on the web, they’re probably going to find more than one. That’s the case with most people. A smart jobseeker will know about these other John Doe’s and be ready when interviewers ask him if he’s lived in Colorado, played the trumpet, or done standup in Seattle (note – the other Paul Merrill’s have.)
Google Alerts
One of the ways jobseekers stay abreast of where their name is used is to set up a Google alert for their name. If you don’t know about Google Alerts, learn more here.
Bing and Google recently signed contracts with Twitter. Now, Google alerts will pick up tweets with the text it’s set to find in addition to normal websites.
It’s also a good idea to search for your twitter handle. There are a number of products out there that allow an individual to monitor their Twitter account’s username and see what others are saying about that user.
Remember, it’s important to create a presence and social footprint on the web. It’s just as important to maintain that presence.
