Sadly, adding a specialist term into a Job title or description is still a thing.
Go to any online jobs website and put “Ninja”, “Rockstar” or “Guru” in the keywords search to see what I mean.
The worst part is that it makes things really confusing – especially if you are actually a Ninja, A Rockstar or a Guru looking for a job.
Most employers check out potential new hires on facebook these days.
According to CareerBuilder.co.uk, more than half (53%) of employers research potential job candidates on social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
The days of simply relying on the candidates CV and what their referees say, is long gone.
Our ability to easily upload content to the internet from anywhere means that future employers will be tempted to look for this content in order to better understand what you may be really like.
They want to confirm that what you have on your CV is factual, and that you are not a secret sociopath who may cause damage to the company in the future. Also, human nature being what it is, they just want to know stuff about you.
A decent percentage of employers do admit to finding out items online, which has persuaded them to not hire a candidate.
For example, this article discusses a female psychiatrist being passed over for a role, due to pictures posted on facebook.
And it does not end at getting the job.
As I have blogged about before, you can get “facebook fired” ifyou decide to post negative comments about fellow workers or the company that employs you.
The rise of activity like this has led to companies such as Reputationdefender.com, and many others, springing up. Reputationdefender.com offers to monitor your Web reputation for $10 USD a month, plus a one-time fee of $30 USD to remove something from the internet, if an unwanted item somehow gets out of control.
This is a good service and may be very useful to some people.
I still believe that the simplest course of action to defend your reputation, is simply to use your common sense.
If that fails, then here are some quick tips to keep in mind:
If you want to do well on the internet, I actually advise you to adopt a paranoid mindset, so that you will THINK BEFORE YOU POST. This will help make your online life much easier to enjoy.
The world of computing and social media gives us so many more opportunities to lie about our job experience.
The average person has so many tools of communication and creation at their disposal these days, that it can help wily job seekers to beef up their work histories like never before.
Suddenly, we can all have experience in networking, direct marketing, community management and website design without ever having gained a single proper qualification in it.
Many employers are possibly still on the backfoot regarding knowing what questions to ask applicants, and how to spot the pretenders.
But there is also a grey area to consider, as some activities that we simply could not easily do 5 or 10 years ago, have been made extremely simple and affordable. This does mean that more people are getting skills far beyond what they should be able to, for their age.
I don’t see this as a bad thing, but it certainly is something to be wary of.
After all, I bet all of you know at least one person that is a “Social Media Marketing Guru”
This is a comic idea that I had a while ago. “Corporate Squid” was a squid who gets employment in an office and then has to deal with the mundane day-to-day repetitiveness that most us call our ‘job’.
Corporate Squid had an illustrious run of exactly two strips. The first is above, and the second never actually made it past the inking stage.
I have decided that over time, I will post comics I have done earlier in my life. As the agent-X Comics have only been officially running since March 2009, I figured you may like to get a taste of some of the random doodles that have come before it.
Some are OK and others are just….. well, they happened and need to be owned up to at some point.