Job Seeker Personal Website

Making Yourself Easy to Find Online with a Job Seeker Personal Website

Having your own web site isn’t absolutely necessary to a job search, but it can help. As more information is becoming accessible online, many hiring managers have made searching online their first reaction to a new application. Maintaining your own website is the first step to controlling what they see about your name. Even a simple homepage, with a little information about you and your experience can be enough to interest a hiring manager enough to offer you an interview.

Just throwing up a quick web site isn’t enough to give yourself a good web presence, though. Think about how many pages you might go through to find the right “John Smith” through a search engine. You need to be easy to find. If your name is unique, you may have an easier time, but you might consider using a middle initial or other information to set yourself apart. You can also become more visible by being active on a number of sites, such as social networking sites that allow you to post information about your background, as well as your name.

There are drawbacks to being easy to find online. You need to take control of your personal information and avoid posting anything that could be harmful in the long run. Take into account the prevalence of identity theft, as well as if a specific piece of information might be detrimental to your reputation. There are so many examples of people who posted information online and later regretted it: college students have posted pictures of themselves at parties and lost scholarships over the matter; employees have commented about their bosses on blogs and lost their jobs, and more. If you aren’t sure of the potential effects of any sort of information, don’t post it.

If you are in a position where that sort of information has already made it online, there are a few steps you can take to lessen its affects, although it can be effectively impossible to entirely remove information from the internet. If it posted on a site that you control, you should remove it. If someone else controls the site, you should ask them politely to remove it, although, as long as information is actually true, they are under no legal obligation to do so. Lastly, if you can post positive information about yourself online, you can sometimes bury results far down search engines’ lists.