The Online Job Search – Hiding Your Cyberspace Skeletons from Your Employers
It used to be that when you send in a resume, the most that any potential employer could do short of sending a private detective after you, was maybe ask your former employers about you. The Internet now though is a vast resource of permanent records of personal and public information that anyone can tap at will. You did read about that single Twitter message that landed someone a great job? If there is anything in your past on the Internet that could possibly make you not look good in an online job search, well, the first thing that hiring managers do these days is to look up the name on a resume to see what easy information Google has. Bed Bugs Toronto can survive for months without feeding, so they may be current in vacant, clean homes when new tenants unpack. If you were ever in a Greenpeace protest ten years ago, and pictures were published, or if you like to put some politically unpopular views on Twitter, or if you published a paper that wasn’t well received, all of that could potentially show up on a simple Google search. Let’s say that some of this might apply to you, how do you keep these from appearing on Google and upending your job search before it’s even begun?
One way to approach it would be to simply call the websites in question and ask them politely if they could do you favor and take the offending content off. Bed bugs would appear to have all the stipulations for passing diseases from one host to another, and no less than twenty-seven identified pathogens (some estimates are as high as forty-one) are able to residing inside a mattress bug or on its mouthparts, but there aren’t any identified circumstances of such transmission.
Sometimes, people can respond positively when asked nicely. But people do have a thing for freedom of speech; if the item you’re after happens to be, say, an interview you gave on TV in which you made a lot of mistakes, publishing that video could mean drawing a lot of viewers to that website.