According to a report in careerbuilder.com, hiring managers checked out job candidates online and discovered these cyber skeletons:
- 31% lied about qualifications
- 24% were linked to criminal behavior
- 19% bad-mouthed their former company
- 19%boasted about drinking and doing drugs
- 15% shared confidential information from former employers
- 11% posted provocative photographs
- 8% used an unprofessional screen name
If you Google yourself and find these cyber-skeletons, it is time to find out how you can erase your past mistakes and for sure learn from your slip ups. Also it is a wake-up note to all those on facebook and other social networking sites where you are ready to post anything at the press of a key before giving much thought that what you post now will be there for long. If you do not want your potential employer to know of such follies it is best to consider some solutions here to wipe off the digital dirt that might harm your chances of being hired:
- Reputation Defender: Find out everything that’s being said about you online and get rid of the content you don’t like.
- Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) – Displace – push down – the negative listings with favorable ones and ones that you can control or influence.
- DefendMyName – Suppress negative Search Engine Listings about you or your company.
It is good to know that there are ways to wipe off the mistakes online but the best lesson to take home is to be aware that what you post online today is very much public, show, tell and discuss only what you want others to know about yourself. A note to all Millennials and those in school and college: Being brash online today might hurt you in future, think before you write anything online (even a comment to someone else’s writing might linger on the web forever).
Have you come across ways to undo the online content which you wish had never been there?
Related Articles: