How long has it been since you did a Google search of your name? If it hasn’t been for some time, you should do that right now. You should do this given that you can be sure others are Googling your name. Years ago, very few people worried about their online reputation. This has all changed.
Your internet reputation is very much like your cover letter, resume, business card, and a portion of your private life, all rolled into a central location.
With plenty of critical information about our lives online, it is no surprise our online reputations act as such a central part in job hunting, college or university admissions, finding new customers and even getting first dates. One somewhat astonishing statistic is that close to 74 percent of business HR departments do an online search of candidates. It also turns out that about 65% of Human Resource professionals have rejected candidates based on records they found doing a Google search.
In essence, a great number of people are missing out on jobs and college admissions, all depending on the way they appear in Google search results. You probably understand your online reputation makes a difference. However, you may not realize precisely what you can do regarding strengthening it.
The first task to strengthening your online reputation is to determine your situation. Everyone’s online reputation is unique — and you aren’t able to fix things you don’t know about.
Conduct a Google search on your own full name to see what is listed on the first few pages. Determine if there are many other people with the your name in the search listings. Gauge the number of unfavorable, good and neutral websites show up regarding you. You’ll want to additionally look at the images and see what kind of pictures appear for your name. If you’ve previously been arrested there’s a great chance your mug shot will turn up in the images.
In a study carried out in 2016 80% of organizations acknowledged using social media while recruiting. It’s highly likely that hiring supervisors will check your social media profiles. For this reason it’s essential that you figure out just how much information you are willing to share openly.
Because social platforms regularly change their privacy controls, you will want to take a glance at each social network to verify who is able to see your account information and posting history. For Facebook, check out an area named Privacy Settings and select the Limit Past Post Visibility choice to conceal your complete personal content. Look over the permissions of social media apps that are installed on each of your mobile devices. These typically differ from personal computer versions of the same social networks.
An online reputation management (ORM) provider like Fix Your Search Results can manage this challenge of pushing unfavorable sites off of the first page of Google. On top of that, they’ll conduct some other activities in order to get undesirable results down from the top of a search — steps which include migrating existing, good web pages up in search rankings to basically replace undesirable listings off the first page. Fix Your Search Results will compose so much good stuff that people aren’t able to come across the detrimental stuff.
You could be tempted to set your social account profiles to private. The plus of doing that is if employers aren’t able to unearth any facts in regards to you besides from the details available in your resume, they’re not about to stumble upon info that reflects badly on your reputation. On the other hand, repressing your appearance excessively places you in peril. The hiring manager could very well quit the search entirely and proceed to a prospect who’s created a healthy online reputation by publicly sharing their social networking profiles.
Once you go with online visibility, you have to filter your social networking posting history. Research your social networking profiles in detail. Should you locate any kind of content which might damage your name, just get rid of it. Concealing these types of possibly harmful postings or images can be precarious. Remember that other individuals could take screen shots and upload this content widely with your name tagged. Anytime you are curating your social networking profiles, maintain content that contributes to the qualified reputation you’ll be creating for your job application.
If you don’t currently have accounts on the significant social media networks such as Instagram and Twitter, forbes.com states that you should develop such accounts now. You’ll need these types of profiles to let you have a social background for people come across, and you likewise need these types of profiles given that these have always been the types of websites Google loves to rank for a search of a person’s name.
Having social media profiles in which you manage the composition, you generate content of a positive quality which will be displayed when people do a Google search on your name. When you at present have damaging results turning up when carrying out a search of your name, these kinds of online pages could turn up above the weak results in the search. At bbc.com they say that this basically squeezes down the adverse web pages whereby they become not so visible to people. That’s a worthwhile thing.
If you happen to presently have social networking web pages, but they do not rank high up in search results, you may want to try to move these properties up in the search rankings. This will require acquiring links to the social media web pages to provide them with a good deal more importance to Google. While possible for a person to accomplish, it is an exercise you might prefer to pass on to the specialists.