I’m always amazed at the kinds of stuff people will post about themselves online. Last week, Businessweek posted a good article about how what you post may eventually come back to harm you – particularly when you enter the job search.
Five years ago, a guy posted about his bad drug trip. Today, the post still comes up on the first page of search results for his name. Another girl was fired for posing suggestively in her airline uniform.
When it comes to looking for a job, all an employer needs to do is Google you and suddenly, all the stuff they couldn’t ask you in the interview comes to light.
But Googling people is also becoming a way for bosses and headhunters to do continuous and stealthy background checks on employees, no disclosure required. Google is an end run around discrimination laws, inasmuch as employers can find out all manner of information — some of it for a nominal fee — that is legally off limits in interviews: your age, your martial status, the value of your house (along with an aerial photograph of it), the average net worth of your neighbors, fraternity pranks, stuff you wrote in college, liens, bankruptcies, political affiliations, and the names and ages of your children.
And there’s very little you can do if some of the findable info about you is inaccurate. Anyone can say pretty much anything about you on the web – how would you know? And if you did know, what could you do about it short of a cease and desist?
I like to write (as you can probably guess from my several websites) but I’m very careful about what personal information I reveal. But then I’m an introvert.
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