The Internet has a life of its own. Nothing truly dies there; it just gets moved from one server to the next, shared from one profile to the next, copied, duplicated and archived.
A driving under the influence arrest lives on in the public records of the county government and is now posted online. A photo published in the local newspaper of a protester throwing a bottle at the police lives on in the newspaper’s online archives. A rant against a former employer is shared, retweeted and liked — living
on, uncontrolled, on social network profiles and feeds.
According to a recent survey conducted by the recruiting firm ExecuNet, 77 percent of employers search the names of job applicants online. Another survey by Harris Interactive found that 53 percent of employers now mine social media sites for information about their prospective employees. Respondents to the survey said the most likely reasons for being disqualified as a candidate are displaying provocative images, including drug or alcohol use, bad-mouthing a previous employer, or showing poor communication skills online.
In recent years, there has been a rapid influx of service web sites that vow to “clean up” your online reputation in order to present yourself as more appealing to possible employers. It has fast become a massive industry, estimated to be worth $5 billion a year. For a fee, websites such as Reputation.com, ReputationHawk, and DefendMyName promise to make those embarrassing photos and Facebook posts nearly invisible to prospective employers by pushing them down the ranks of the results in search engines.
Reputation.com’s Reputation Defender service promises to bury the unwanted content with praise, by creating content and posting it to handpicked, personalized websites in an attempt to fool search engines. For this kind of service, Reputation.com charges $3,000 to $15,000.
However, this will not erase any compromising information that is already on the Internet. Reputation websites may help hide some of the information that’s out there, but they can’t get rid of it forever. Perhaps it would be more efficient, not to mention cheaper, to manage your reputation yourself.
Emilio Lorenzo, career advisor at the Office of Career Development, believes so. Rather than pay someone to try to clean up the damage, which will not even be permanently removed, he said that it’s better to avoid posting any compromising material altogether.
“Know how to use your privacy settings on your accounts and use them effectively,” Lorenzo said. “These reputation websites do a lot for their prices, but it’s something that people could just do themselves.”
Senior English major Sophie Gourgiotis tried BrandYourself.com, an online reputation management company that offers a free service and promises to help highlight all the good while hiding all the bad.
“It didn’t do anything,” Gourgiotis said. “I could only load three web sites [to highlight] and it didn’t change my rankings on Google at all.”
Ultimately, students should take charge of their own online reputation. Lorenzo said networking is all about strategy.
“At the end of the day, the individual needs to take ownership of their accounts and what they post online,” Lorenzo said. “If they’re going to use their Twitter for their social life, that’s fine. However, once they start reaching out to employers, that’s the image you are presenting yourself with. It’s all about how you market yourself.”
