Employers today are relying more and more on online platforms to aid their search for the right talent. Granted, the advent of the job portal was more than a decade ago but as such websites continue to evolve, their functionalities also grow into more effective recruitment tools. And, even social networking has been integrated into the industry as an avenue for sourcing and background verification.
With this landscape in mind, it has become more important to watch how we present our selves, our words and our actions online. Because we never know who’s watching at any given moment, we must take it upon ourselves to police our online activity and make sure that we’re projecting the professional image that companies are looking for. How, you ask?
1. Switch to private settings. This is the safest thing to do, by far, to our online profiles. Almost all social media sites or networks have advanced controls that enable us to become invisible to certain types of audiences. This means that we can show our most personal information and posts to our close friends and trusted colleagues, while blocking out strangers who just casually view other people’s pages. This can even prevent all but the most skillful intruders from using our information against us or for their own gains.
2. Limit the nature of the publicly visible details. Sometimes, though, we actually need to be noticed by other people outside our established network. If so, we can publish personal information safely by choosing which specific details we put in our online profiles. While publishing our names, photos and professional or academic background can help us establish our identity and our authenticity as a real person using a real account, publicly sharing our full home address, work address or other private contact information can be risky. The logic here is, only legitimate employers who are interested in our skills and experience will ask our permission to get our phone number or email address.
3. Consider being more mature in connecting or following. Social networks are platforms to have good fun, and we all have at some point joined groups, followed pages or added on to hashtags that were made for that same purpose. However, there is a need for us to draw the line between fun that still makes sense and fun that’s just pointless. We all have different senses of humor, so we can still stick to what tickles our funny bones. We just have to remember that being associated with such sites that are presented in a clean way will definitely make a better impression than publishing our involvement in pages that have a questionable subject, background or presentation. There is, after all, some truth to what they say that we are judged based on the friends we keep.
4. Always have an up-to-date set of application documents uploaded in a secure page. Having our cover letters and resumés or CVs saved to a convenient location can help us on many different levels. When uploaded to job portals or saved in emails, we can send them to prospect employers in place of printed documents. Applicant tracking systems and advanced search functions in job portals can also pick up our documents when they contain the same keywords that employers use in their vacant position ads. Finally, uploaded documents can be printed out when needs arise, even on short notice.
5. Edit online profile pages to resemble resumés. Some employers don’t even bother downloading an uploaded resumé; they go straight to the candidate’s job portal page or online portfolio. The same trick with keywords applies here: a profile that uses the same keywords as the prospect employer will get noticed much more quickly and more often. For art & design portfolios, the best finished pieces together with detailed works in progress show both the results we can achieve, and the process we used to arrive at it.
6. Learn to say things creatively. By creatively, we actually mean the opposite of “destructively” here. If we can express ourselves online without going to moral or ethical extremes, we can show a level of professionalism that tackles society and the world with the intention of making it a better place. Employers would feel much more secure with people who seem to take responsibility for their words and actions than with people who are vulgar and reckless online.
7. Take these tips with a healthy dose of common sense. This is not a call for us to change who we truly are. Rather, this guide aims to shape our true selves into the best forms that we can take. There is a professional deep inside each of us waiting to be brought out into the real world, and having healthy habits for presenting ourselves in public or online can be rewarding from a career-building perspective. So go ahead: keep believing in that worthy cause or listening to favorite music or even sharing that post from another funny page. At the same time, we have to take responsibility for asking ourselves, “Is this page or post consistent with the image I want to build online?” When we can say Yes to that question, we’’ll be on the right track.
Getting on the good side of prospect employers through an attractive online presence is not about compromising our freedom of expression. It’s about having the discipline to understand and maintain the propriety of our online actions and their consequences. It’s ok to want people to accept us for who we are, but our conscience must also remind us that we are part of a much bigger world and become a deciding factor in our actions. When we know exactly why we are looking for employment, using our conscience as a guide comes naturally.
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