Lawyers.com > Understand Your Legal Issue > Keep Digital Dirt From Derailing Your Job Search

If you're an Internet junkie - keeps Facebook or MySpace web pages or posts on YouTube - who just happens to be looking for a job, you'd better watch your Internet-back because there is a strong probability that job recruiters and potential employers are checking the Internet to see what there is out there about you!

Finding Digital Dirt

It's all there. The pictures of your fraternity or sorority Halloween party and a close-up of you holding two half-empty mugs with vacant eyes staring into the camera and that sheepish grin - not images that you would want a potential employer to see. The employer, looking for someone with mature and professional qualities, is not going to come away with that impression of you after looking at those kinds of photos!

You can easily find out what digital dirt is on the Internet by doing what job recruiters and employers are doing - Google yourself. Try it with other major search engines. Job recruiters will look you up on people search engines such as Spock.com, Wink.com and Zoominfo.com.

Although some people may question an employer's ethics in delving into a potential employee's private life that may have no bearing on the job being filled, such conduct is not illegal. Others argue that a job seekers have no right to complain of employer Internet searches when the applicants voluntarily choose to reveal information about themselves.

Damage Control

Now that you've found some negative or unflattering information about you on the Internet, you need to take action to minimize the effect the information will have on your employment opportunities.

Cleanup your social network profiles. You control a good part of the content placed on these pages and, more importantly, who can view them. Some steps that you can take to cleanup your digital image include:

• Set your Facebook.com or MySpace.com profiles and personal blogs to "friends only" or hide them entirely from view
• If allowed, keep you web pages from being indexed by the major search engines
• Edit or delete any harmful or embarrassing comments you made on blogs, message boards and social networking pages

Be two-faced. Create two separate e-mail addresses:

• A professional e-mail account (firstname.lastname@gmail.com) that you use for business activities or job hunting
• An anonymous e-mail account that you can use for your personal online life and is not connected to your professional life

Beg for anonymity. Web site owners or web masters are not obligated to remove information that they've published on the Internet, unless the information is defamatory (false). If you can't show that it is false, you may have to beg, plead or cajole to get the bad information off of their sites. You can also purchase software such as ReputationDefender.com, Brandseye.com or other reputation monitoring software to search for and remove damaging formation.

Create a new image. If you can't get rid of all the digital dirt, you can minimize its effect by increasing the amount of positive information about you. You do this a number of ways:

• Start a blog about a subject of interest in your profession or post comments in other professional blogs. Frequent entries capture the interest of search engines and will result in your blog being at the top of search lists
• Create a professional website that displays your resume, any articles you've written, any articles about you, awards you've received and links to your blog and other professional websites

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