Today, almost everyone spends time online and almost everyone has at least one personal niche on the web where they profile themselves. This is often a social network site, like Facebook or Twitter, but it is also common to have blogs on WordPress, Blogspot or even a website of your own. It is therefore not unthinkable that people go look you up on the internet when you are going to apply for an internship or a job. I happen to know the lives of some people on my Twitter timeline from minute to minute, which can be amusing for the followers, but which also gives away very much about yourself. The people in companies and businesses who check the online profiles also try to analyse your personality based on what they find on your profiles. So, if you often complain loudly and with swear words about your jobs and lectures, they may consider you inapt for the labour market in general. Hence why I decided to give a few tips about professionalizing yourself online.
It is best to start searching for yourself on the web first. Try different search entries, such as first name + last name + hometown, your e-mail address(es), and some other combinations of tags by which you are easily identifiable and findable. If you come across 'unwanted' profiles of yourself, delete them or, less rigorously, (temporarily) deactivate them. I just found a LiveJournal profile of myself that hosted immature stuff from when I was a teenager, I immediately copy-pasted the posts into private documents and deleted the profile. My stories are safe, yet they are not openly readable to everyone. It is also important to browse yourself from time to time. When I googled myself a few months ago, my LiveJournal did not show up in the search result, but today it did.
Now that you have searched yourself on the web and deleted unwanted information, it is time to take a look at the profiles that you wish you keep active and that you cannot live without. Facebook has an option that allows you to view your profile as it is shown to the public or to specific friends. Analyse all visible information: what do you want your future employers to know immediately about you and what not? Do you want them to see you lying on the beach in bikini? Do you want them to see you pole dancing on the bar the one night in your life you were drunk? Does it add something to you if your future employer knows how often you declare your love to Robert Pattinson on your wall? To all these questions, the answer is probably no. You either delete these things from your profile or you change your privacy settings so that only your friends can see these things. What you do want your future employers to see, however, is a curriculum vitae or résumé. I personally have my settings so that they can see my education and work experience. In the following picture you can see what my Facebook profile looks like to non-friends. No posts, no wall, just an overview of where I worked what I did there.
On Twitter, you can protect your tweets, that is, your settings are such that only those you approved as followers will be able to read them. Of course, you might as well just think before you post. Once online is always online, after all. Keep in mind that you decide what others can see! Check your settings and deliberate who you want to see what of your online profiles.
So, you have cleaned and cleared your social network profiles (at least, I hope you have, or maybe you were one of those wise people who never had everything visible to everyone). Now it is time to have a look at your e-mail addresses. angelofhell@hotmail.com or pinkpetals@gmail.com sound cute and might say something about who you are as a person, but in professional contexts, it is better to have a more professional address, based on your name(s), initials, and/or date/year of birth. My university gives every student a university e-mail address, based on initials and your surname. You may use this, but you have to be aware that there will be one day that your university mail address is no longer for you.
Now comes the real thing, the thing that shows the world that you are grown-up and mature, that you are ready for serious internships or the labour market. The most well-known website that hosts millions of résumés and CVs of people all over the world. LinkedIn. I was joking about the grown-up and mature thing, but it is a great place to show the world what you are capable of and what you have done in the past. It allows you to provide the world detailed descriptions of your education, (volunteer) work experience, extra courses you have taken, internships, theses, publications, languages, skills and expertise, and projects you have participated in. LinkedIn is basically a website that shows an extended résumé of yourself and where you can connect with teachers, classmates, (former) co-workers, and other people who work in your field. Since it comes down to sharing strictly professional and educational experiences, it is perfectly safe to add all of your teachers and colleagues. I love LinkedIn because it lets me connect with teachers from university without having to show them my holiday pictures.
What you see in the picture above is a short summary of my LinkedIn profile. But you still are not done. It is also important to check your settings your Google or Yahoo or whichever cloud services you use. Imagine you save your holiday photos in Picasa (using Google cloud services here because I use them most frequently), but you have them set to be visible to everyone. Unwanted situation, of course. The same goes for Google Docs. You just do not want your future employer to know about your Hunger Games fanfiction or your online diary about how much you hate how a course is taught in your university without giving any constructive criticism for improvement! The same goes for any blog, photo sharing, and whatever services are provided online. Just check your settings and change them if they might yield undesired results. Congratulations! Now you can profile yourself online without concern.
Last but not least, it is important to know that it may occur that people from inside the companies try to befriend you so that they can check more of your profile. It is thus important to only add people if you have met them in real life and if you are sure that you are going to work for the company. You do not want to be refused in the end because some HR person you have never met shared your bar and beach pictures with your no-longer future boss?
Do you have a LinkedIn profile already? What are your settings for Facebook and Twitter? Do you think twice before you put stuff online? Have you looked yourself up on the web already? How did that feel for you? Let me know!
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