Jobseekers! How’s Your Googlability?

“𝙎𝙝𝙚 𝙬𝙖𝙨 𝙤𝙣𝙚 𝙨𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙖𝙬𝙖𝙮 𝙛𝙧𝙤𝙢 𝙡𝙖𝙣𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙝𝙚𝙧 𝙙𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢 𝙟𝙤𝙗. 𝙏𝙝𝙚𝙣 𝙨𝙝𝙚 𝙖𝙣𝙨𝙬𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣…𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙗𝙡𝙚𝙬 𝙞𝙩.”

🚨 Jobseekers, take note! 🚨

An excerpt from @Katharine Hansen’s “Tell Me About Yourself” book highlights a critical truth in today’s hiring world:

🔍 Employers Google you—before they ever call you.
🎯 Your online presence is your first impression.
💬 “If you don’t have an identity on the Web, you don’t exist.” —Ross Mayfield, CEO, Socialtext.

Recruiters are even trained to search the web strategically to find candidates. And those with a clean, visible, and positive digital footprint get the first calls.

✅ Be searchable.
✅ Be strategic.
✅ Be safe—only post what you’d proudly read on the front page of the New York Times.

From the book:

Chapter 6 on portfolios touched on the growing trend in which employers seek information on candidates by looking them up on Internet search engines and the accompanying importance of creating and managing an online presence. To underscore that importance, Ross Mayfield says, “If you don’t have an identity on the Web, you don’t exist.” Mayfield is CEO of Socialtext, an enterprise social software company, in an article published in NewsFactor Network.

Alice Hanson, a Seattle-based recruiter who worked for a large software company, recently described how she finds candidates: “The first thing I do is go to Google and look for resumes that are posted to the Internet. These are the first people I call because they are free,” she explained. The number of citations or “hits” on Google is considered a reasonable gauge of a candidate’s visibility. Google searches are so crucial to recruiters that they hold training classes, write manuals, and share secrets on discussion boards about exotic Google search strategies to find candidates. Keep in mind, though, that employers and recruiters aren’t just looking for your “Googlability” or how many times your name pops up in a search. They’re also interested in how positive your online image is. Thus, you need to be very careful of how you project your story online. The Internet is a highly public medium, and personal information floating out there in cyberspace could unfortunately work against you. A prospective employer could view a comment that you innocently post to an online discussion group negatively. The advice of an anonymous blog contributor is worth heeding: “Never post anything that you wouldn’t be willing to read on the front page of the New York Times.”

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