Online Reputation Management The New Resume

Added by on August 30, 2011

With so many unemployed recent college graduates it’s becoming increasingly diffucult for recent graduates to get a good job right out of college. Wha its hurting recent college graduates even more, according to a recent ABC news story, is not their work experience, or their age, but their online reputation.

College students have pictures posted on their Facebook partying at fraternity or sorority houses, as well as stories, blogs, and videos posted all over the internet of their wild antics.
“Perhaps these students didn’t realize that their future employer would be searching their possible hires and seeing what the internet says about them” – Professor Johnathon Reynolds who teaches the Relationship Management MBA course at New York University.

The problem is once you put something on the world wide web it expands well beyond the first place you post it. There are millions of websites that crawl and scrape content off of other websites and use that information to fill up their own websites with content and many of the webmasters are impossible to track down thus leaving students with a permanently damaged online reputation.

There are only a few realistic solutions to really solve the damaged issues. The most expensive one that recent graduates used to try in the past was to hire a lawyer. Unfortunately with the fair use and freedom of speech laws search engines are not likely to remove pages from search results or web pages that they index unless it is a serious violation of their terms of service.

The next solution holds in a new service that is being recognized as the Web 2.0 resume. It’s online reputation management. Services like Reputation Diagram and Profile Defenders. Services like this provide results like when your name is searched, instead of seeing the parties you had at the beach during spring break, searchers instead see your positive attributes explaining why you might just be the most fit for employment.

With so many things stopping recent graduates from getting a job in this climate it makes the most sense to make the best possible first online impression.