What is the Digital Exhaust You Leave in Your Wake?

photo thanks to autoguide.com

No the title is not my line. I am not that clever or cool. But I was impressed by the top executive search consultant based in Dallas who did use it.

And the point she was making? In searching for candidates for positions, she is able to recover much data and information that people leave in their wake online. Some of it is good and some of it is preferable to be gone.

Your reputation is a piece of your brand, and anything found online that would tarnish it would be better removed or buried down multiple search pages in Google.  Unflattering or uncomfortable Facebook photos are obvious culprits. But other items are more stealthy like political donations, real estate sales of multi-million dollar homes, complaints to the City Health Department by your neighbors, prayer meditations you led, lawsuits, participation in sports and events. You get the picture and so do the hiring managers.

You have to decide how much you want to show to the world of your private life. If the answer is not much, then you must systematically and persistently work to push down the offending content. How is this done? The easiest way is to put brand-building content up that is fresher and newer, thus older material is pushed down. This will not work for listings in Wikipedia and IMDB but one assumes they have value for you.

Posting  content on sites like Quora, Vimeo and Tumblr would be helpful as well as profiles on the Linkedin competitors such as Viadeo, Xing, Apnacircle, Tianji and Orkut. They will give you a global reach as well. Of cours Google is top billing thanks to its algorithms to a named website and a named blog. What do I mean by named? Look at the URL name at the top of this blog. It is mine and therefore when Google sees it it gives it preference over other types of posted content.

I did not mention how much work it is to put up good content and keep it there but it is a really small price to pay for being screened in for a job and not out.

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