Job Search Tip: Beware of Too Much Information on Your Online Social Networks

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Job Search Tip: Beware of Too Much Information on Your Online Social Networks

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I get a lot of great comments from my readers (which I love). One of these was a response to MySpace Killed the Candidate…critical job interview tip, in which I told the cautionary tale of one of my candidates leaving too much information on her MySpace page and losing a job opportunity: avoid such issues by setting your social networks to private, and be careful who you accept as a friend.

Still, there are things to keep in mind: like, how much of your stuff automatically gets shared when you interact with a new application? And…even if you are vigilant about keeping up with your privacy settings, your friends can inadvertently share your private information with third parties very easily. Mary Madden has a great discussion of issues like these in Securing Private Data from Internet ‘Zombies.’ There’s also a great stream of comments to go with it. I highly suggest you read it.

Online social networks can be great for boosting your career and job search, so I’m not saying “don’t use them,” I’m just saying “use them wisely”. Aside from the biggies like FaceBook and MySpace, LinkedIn is tailored for career networks and job-searching applications. Tech Crunch’s article Nine Ways to Build Your Own Social Network offers a list of nine up-and-coming “white label” social networking platforms and explains what each of them does. They could prove very useful.

Critical advice: you should Google yourself (with all the possible versions of your name) once in a while to see what’s out there about you. Is your online identity sabotaging your executive job search? explains that employers and executive recruiters will Google you, and you need to know what they will find. What kind of online presence do you have? Ideally, you should have a positive one, with the number of search results correlating with your years of experience. (It’s a personal branding issue.)