Online Reputation Management example

Yes, recruiters will Google for information about you as soon as you are among one of the last candidates left. Once you are in that situation and your future company is having a look what information is available about you online it is too late for you to change it. To give the recruiter the right picture, the one that YOU WANT him / her to see, this practice is called Online Reputation Management.

There are some myths and some true facts about recruiters searching online for you on Google, Facebook or other social networks. Fact is that a good recruiter will sooner or later Google for your name and have a look what he can find out about you but not all applicants will be searched for as a first step, recruiters simply do not have the time to do so and spend hours for every candidate. Nevertheless it is important to take care of this step before you apply or actually constantly take care about it. If you have a super standard name such as Will Smith (even better because there is a celebrity behind) or in Hungarian Kovács László the chances are fairly small that the recruiter finds information about you since there are thousands of others with your name.

But from the beginning, think as a recruiter and do a simple search for yourself in Google and see what you will find. Depending on how active you are online you will find several information such as you Facebook profile, maybe your Twitter account but also maybe sports results from school times or anything else that has been published about you, not only by you. As a matter of fact you have 10 results in Google on the first page and I think that will be enough information for the recruiter to find out more about you. Now you want the person searching for you to find exactly the things that you want to have there. Maybe in your Facebook profile you posted pictures of partying with friends or bathing naked in Lake Balaton and you do not want your future employer to see that but rather the interview that you have given with the magazine which has very good authority in your environment or you want to show the recruiter your work you have done as a photographer, the speech you have given at that conference which was uploaded to YouTube or simply your LinkedIn profile to see your work career again and maybe even see recommendations from your colleagues. It is up to you what you want him to see so now lets go and influence that.

The practice this is done with is called Search Engine Optimization or short SEO. The way to influence search engines to make them rank the pages that you would like to see up there. One main factor for search engines to evaluate the ranking of a page are links. Links coming from page A linking to page B. Now what you need to do is find ways to link from a page to e.g. your homepage, your LinkedIn profile and so on. This is hard work to find and do it but it is worth it. If you have a LinkedIn profile for example you have the possibility to link you Twitter account or your website in the profile, that will help you to rank that page for your name. SEO is an own industry (There are SEO Jobs in Budapest as well) so it is fairly complex but the basics you can of course read on Wikipedia for example.

Once you decided which 10 results the recruiter ideally should see about you it is time to start gathering some links and soon you will have a clear first result page about you, hiding the bad and just showing the good sides of yourself. Of course a too clean result might be a bit too obvious, so leave some room for humanity in there. If you are interested in this topic have a look at the Wikipedia article about Online Reputation Management, you can find a lot of useful information there to go on with. This article was rather as a hint to start doing it, its a long process so begin before your application.

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