Creating a Gem of a Career

Put Your Best Face Forward

"It's a big problem when someone's Facebook profile says that her favorite thing is to get s--tfaced on a Saturday night."

Your network may make companies transparent to you, but you're transparent to employers as well. Anything online, whether easily available or tucked away in a private network, is fair game. "It's a big problem when someone's Facebook profile says that her favorite thing is to get s--tfaced on a Saturday night," says Masie. "Google is the first stop for finding info [on potential hires], then Facebook," he says. So there may be a number of versions of "you" being projected into the world. Not all of them will necessarily be what you want an employer to see. Can you control that? If not, can you live with it?

Over time, hiring managers will be less interested in the salacious stuff that a Google search might reveal. "So you were president of your frat," says Morris. "As more information gets out there about everyone, it diffuses the importance of each individual piece of information. It will be okay."

But that doesn't mean you won't have to manage your professional image. Lara Kammrath, a psychology postdoc at Columbia University who is making the rounds in the academic job market, recently had to deal with one of those moments when the Web's power rears up and surprises you. She arrived for an interview at a school in Ohio on a Friday, and the dean asked her how her job talk in New York the previous Monday had gone. She was shocked. Turns out that her "candidate talk" had been posted on the calendar of events at the New York school's site, and it turned up in a Google search. Kammrath couldn't help feeling panicked. "I wondered if they were waiting to see if I mentioned it," she says. "A lot of the politics of these jobs is whether they think you'll say yes. They might go with a less preferred candidate with a higher chance of return if they thought my interviewing at another school was a sign that I wasn't placing them first on my list." She got the offer (and turned it down), but the experience was nerve-wracking.

It's no wonder, then, that there are now services to groom the online you. "Reputation management" outfits such as ZoomInfo, a Waltham, Massachusetts-based company, aim to aggregate information about people from the Web into profiles with a professional focus. The company's technology crawls the Web in search of names to match with particular kinds of information: location, position, education, experiences, and credentials. The good news is that it's not interested in anything but who you are as a professional. And ZoomInfo's customers are large companies (more than 20% of the Fortune 500) that subscribe precisely so they don't have to wade through the muck when they need to look someone up. Even Google uses ZoomInfo when it's looking for a particular kind of person to fill a job opening.

"We've got 70 million people identified," says ZoomInfo founder and CEO Jonathan Stern. "We're able to create power searches to find people with specific certifications, who have worked at specific places, or have specific affiliations." Stern calls it "comparison shopping" for the kinds of people companies would like to hire. And you have input into what appears on your "label" when those hiring managers go shopping. "We want to give people more control over what is found when people look them up," Stern says. Simply go to ZoomInfo.com, search for yourself, then review what turns up. There may be several profiles for one name, indicating that the engine thinks these may all be different people. If you register with the site, which is free, you can make changes to the profile, adding accurate information about your education and work experience, and your contact information if you want companies to find you directly. You can also review all the Web links that have been aggregated under your name and verify that "this is me" or that it isn't. Then write a paragraph or two about who you are and what goals you have. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a small way to shape the impression you give clients and bosses if they search for you online.