Your Best Cyber Foot Forward: Managing Your Online Professional Profile

May 14, 2008 – 9:10 pm

Carmen Kontur-Gronquist, the former mayor of Arlington, Ore., knows from personal experience how dangerous it can be to not monitor one’s online presence. Kontur-Gronquist was removed from office in February after a firestorm erupted - much of it via the Internet - when some snooping citizens found photos of her posing in her lingerie on one of the town’s fire trucks.

Those photos were taken in 2004, long before Kontur-Gronquist, a 42-year-old single mother, ever considered a run for office. However, all it took was a cruise through MySpace to find the photos, which at the time were still available to the public.

It was a hard lesson for Kontur-Gronquist, but a good one for the rest of us. With more and more companies conducting background checks on a regular basis - even for long-time employees - it only makes sense to keep tabs on what’s floating out there about you.

It goes without saying that the fastest way to give a prospective employer information about your private life is to provide him with an e-mail address that offers a glimpse into parts of your life that you may want to keep secret. E-mail addresses with such monikers as racymom4477 and divorcedhotguy2323 should definitely be avoided, as should such seemingly harmless but needlessly telling names as iloveteddies9087. These kind of e-mail addresses just tell the boss too much about your non-professional image, which is not what you want him envisioning if you want a job offer.

You also need to look for any information that may be available about you from search engines. You may need to change the content of some of your Web pages. There may also be Internet hits that you can’t hide or don’t want to hide - so you’d better be ready to answer them.

I had a friend who was a journalist - and a very vocal member of a political party. He wrote a daily blog that shared his somewhat controversial thoughts about various candidates, policies, and other issues. That he was excellent at his job was unarguable. However, journalists are supposed to be neutral, and his editor was pretty ticked off that her employee was out discussing his views. She also seemed fairly annoyed that he was online for all the world to see, spouting a philosophy that conflicted with her own.

There was no company policy that supported the editor’s demands that the employee refrain from publicly taking a political stand. The reporter had the First Amendment on his side, and he was allowed to continue writing his blog. However, there is no question that his broadcast of his views, on a blog with his name and his photo clearly displayed, had a negative impact on his career with that company. When he ultimately chose to leave for a new job after five years of employment, he was the only reporter on the staff who had not been offered a merit pay raise.
The information available about you via social networking sites can also jeopardize your career search. Sites such as MySpace - which provided the suicide blow to Carmen Kontur-Gronquist’s political career - can and will be trolled by prospective employers. If you have information that you don’t want others to see, don’t make it public. And beware - even if your site is a model of decorum, you may be done in by your friend’s pages. Diligent monitoring of potential public gaffes - even if it takes a few hours of your life every few weeks - is certainly well worth it for the future of your career.

In the Information Age, it is common for someone to Google you as a quick background check. It’s unlikely that you will be able to leave no trace on the Internet so instead it is important that you choose wisely where you post your information online and to associate with sites that present you in the way you want. VisualCV is one such online service that allows you to manage your online presence with public and private versions of your biography and resume information and combines it with the ability to attach multimedia.

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