Employers Googling your name

bleenoth

Just wonder how much this does actually happen in reality.

You read about people Facebook 'antics' possibly lessening their chances of employment if a prospective employer goes on a web surfing session.

A tabloid story in the week triggered my thoughts on this - two girls were punished at school for dyeing their hair in bright colours, and the story reached the Daily Mail - now potentially this will be searchable for years and years to come if an employer wished to do so.

It also brings to mind a friend of mine whose name, town and age was the same as a guy who was sent to prison. I remember he got a good ribbing at work for it at the time, but if anyone does a search on his name, they could potentially find 'he' was jailed for a serious crime. (It won't matter to him as he works in Australia now) but the potential is there for someone to come to the wrong conclusion.

So two examples of how your name being online could affect your employment chances.

Mr_Pitiful

bleenoth wrote: »

A tabloid story in the week triggered my thoughts on this - two girls were punished at school for dyeing their hair in bright colours, and the story reached the Daily Mail - now potentially this will be searchable for years and years to come if an employer wished to do so.

In this case they shouldn't have gone to the Daily Mail, pictured with the obligatory victim face.

Nicki

I'm not sure that things remain accessible online to a casual surfer for anywhere nearly as long as people think.

My previous job resulted my name being in the national newspapers a lot over a ten year period, but if I google my name now, only a couple of those newspaper reports still come up. Things seem to drop off the search function after about 5 years IME.

Anyone with access to full newspaper archives or the Colindale library could find this sort of stuff which is how journalists and investigators are easily able to dig stuff up but most employers won't go that far.

Sharon87

Well if a name appears up how does the employer know it's the same person who has applied for the job? Especially if you have a generic name. It's not a fullproof way of looking up people, unless you know what they look like and the article or web page has a picture.

So if your friend who'd dyed her hair gets an employer searching for her, they wouldn't know what she looks like until she comes in for interview, and by then she may look different anyway (depends on what colour hair she has I guess!

But most searches, when I search mine name bring up Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin pages anyway. And for me it brings up my portfolio on this job website I use! On the front page, which is quite weird lol

Pupnik

I think it is a good habit to search your name every now and then and just check what shows up on the first couple of pages. Luckily for me, my name is not unusual and there are people with a public profile who share the same name so Google does not have anything about me on the first few pages. It's also worth checking Facebook every now and then as they change their privacy settings a lot.

There was a case recently of someone successfully suing Yahoo and Google because his image showed up in a search for a criminal. You can read about it here http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2222545/Google-Loses-Defamation-Suit-for-Linking-Australian-Mans-Image-to-Gangster

The boundaries are still being set when it comes to the internet and personal privacy. Just this week there was a man who was demoted after making some anti-gay mariage comments on his Facebook, he won his appeal against his employer http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-20357131 Hopefully cases like this will make employers less search-happy but everyone should make sure they have private Facebook settings or carefully managed groups so that the wrong people don't read personal things.

TonyMMM

Using Google, Facebook and any other social media sites to check out prospective applicants for jobs is standard practice in almost any business now .... I know (from personal involvement in recruitment) of loads of cases where people didn't get job interviews because of their online history (mostly facebook pics/posts).

.... your past will catch up on you !

MissSarah1972

TonyMMM wrote: »

Using Google, Facebook and any other social media sites to check out prospective applicants for jobs is standard practice in almost any business now .... I know (from personal involvement in recruitment) of loads of cases where people didn't get job interviews because of their online history (mostly facebook pics/posts).

.... your past will catch up on you !

No sane person would have a profile open to the public

[Deleted User]

I've known people to search LinkedIn before interviewing people.. It's meant to be more truthful than CVs!

keyser666

I search linkedin beofre I goto interviews to get and idea of the prospective people interviewing me. I think it helps when you may tap onto something in their CV that they do or enjoy doing

AbbieCadabra

TonyMMM wrote: »

Using Google, Facebook and any other social media sites to check out prospective applicants for jobs is standard practice in almost any business now

as an employer, completely agree with this. also used for any new business contact/client you may have too, always useful to get as much background info as you can.

MissSarah1972 wrote: »

No sane person would have a profile open to the public

i was surprised by how many people have open profiles, especially considering what was on them!

Nine_Lives

Nicki wrote: »

I'm not sure that things remain accessible online to a casual surfer for anywhere nearly as long as people think.

I can access information via Google on a relative of mine dating back to the early 90s, just by simply throwing their name & their name alone into a Google search.

If 22 years isn't a "long" period, then what is?