6 Ways To Find Your Digital Dirt Before Your Employer

We all know digital dirt can cloud your job search or career development without you even knowing it. But how do you even know it’s there?

Here are six ways you can proactively undercover negative information about yourself before your current or prospective employer finds it:

1. Internet Searches

Start with doing a few Internet searches of yourself. Don’t limit yourself to Google, and don’t limit yourself to just your proper name. Use a few Internet search engines, and check variations of your name in quotes (with and without your middle initial, for example).

Also, check any nicknames you use, your telephone number, and your e-mail address. Conduct image or photo searches as well. What comes up in these searches?

Keep in mind that any results that come up this easily for you will come up just as easily for a legal recruiter, potential employer, interviewer, or anyone else who has the power to positively—or negatively—affect your job search and career. Set up Google alerts to keep you posted on new information.

2. Social Media, Blogs, And Forum Searches

Who hasn’t put up an ill-advised post on a social media platform? Well, now’s the time to do something about it.

Go through all your posts and photos. Review, lock down, or delete anything you don’t want to explain to a potential employer. Check the name and e-mail address associated with a “tainted” social media, blog, or forum account. Can it be easily traced back to you? Do you need to change the alias? Or close the account?

3. Public Records Searches

Public records are also a potential source of information. They’re often databases that are part of the “hidden Internet,” so they don’t come as part of a general Internet search.

You have to go to the database to find those records. What kind of public records are found in databases like this? Court records, tax records, real estate records, and criminal records, among others. These records are routinely searched by employers who conduct background checks as part of the hiring process. You can search the public government databases for your county and state to see what they say about you.

Again, search under your name and address, along with any options (like phone number or Social Security number) they offer. Alternatively, you can pay an online service to do it for you.

Conduct these searches at least once a year—even if you’re convinced you’ve done nothing wrong. Every recording agency makes mistakes (like transposing digits in Social Security numbers), and you want to uncover those mistakes as fast as possible.

Otherwise, those lingering mistakes could prevent you from getting your dream job oradvancing your career.

4. Credit Checks

Credit checks are also routine for some employers and some job opportunities. There are three major credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion), and each produces its own report on you.

Credit checks produce information like whether you’ve applied for a credit card; your work and address history; your maximum line of credit on each credit card, along with details about the terms of payment; whether and how often you’re late in payments; whether you’ve ever been referred to a collection agency; and whether you’ve been sued, arrested, or filed for bankruptcy.

The credit bureaus use this information as part of their algorithms to calculate your credit score.

Again, this information isn’t public, but it’s routinely requested as part of a background check so you need to know what those credit bureaus are saying about you. Negative information can stay on your credit report for up to 7 years (up to 10 years for some bankruptcy information).

Because each credit bureau complies its information independently, you need to get and review a credit report from each bureau.

Thankfully, the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) entitles you to one free credit report (this report likely won’t have a credit score) from each bureau every 12 months.

5. Employment History Checks

Call the Human Resources department of current and former employers and find out what information they give to prospective employers who inquire about you. Will they give job titles? Dates of employment? Reason for leaving?

You need to know what HR will say about you so that your resume, job applications, and other representations match.

Also, keep in mind that an employment history check with HR may ease your mind if you’ve ever left an employer under bad circumstances because many employers have a policy against giving your reasons for leaving. (Which is not to say that it won’t be uncovered in other ways, like reference checks!)

6. Educational History Checks

Order your transcripts from every school of higher education you’ve attended, if you don’t already have copies. Be sure those transcripts will verify your major, transferred credits, graduation date, honors, and GPA.

You don’t want a potential employer to find a discrepancy. (I knew an attorney who lost a job opportunity because of a 0.01 error in reporting his GPA on his resume.) While you’re gathering this information, confirm all your CLE or professional education credits, too.

Your 5-Step Method For Defining Job Satisfaction

Question: How do I pick my major if I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up?

Answer: Start with the end in mind. As with writing a speech, you determine what your objective is and what it is you hope to instill in your audience, and only THEN do you begin to write your speech. Make sense? Same with job searching, picking a major, choosing internships, finding related clubs and activities, and more: You begin with the end in mind.

Every step you take, even in the moment, is another step on a path that will lead to one place or some other. Once you define you want to go north, south, or anywhere in between, you can take out a compass and start down the path. I tell people just starting college, “job satisfaction years from now will be affected by the decisions you make today.”

That being the case, why not try to define “job satisfaction” now? For many young people, the reason they don’t is they don’t yet know what job they want. Nonetheless, without a sense of what “job satisfaction” may be for you, it will be very difficult to pick the right major; so let’s start with that – job satisfaction.

5-Step Method For Defining Job Satisfaction

At the core of job satisfaction is an understanding of what it is you enjoy most. To understand what it is you enjoy most, you have to define ALL you enjoy, from most to least; an exercise that will help lead to a decision regarding not only your major, but internships and future job development.

Sound enticing? That’s why we approach this not as an exercise to pick a major but to define job satisfaction (we begin with the end in mind). Afterward, we will see how it can lead you back to defining your major, so let’s begin!

1. Determine What Job Satisfaction Means To You

For some, job satisfaction stems from the challenges in the job or a sense of purpose. For others, it’s more extrinsic and may be measured by the money they make. Or, it may come from the learning that takes place or from knowing their work matters. Finally, for others, simply having a job to go to everyday in order to have other things in life is fine, and it’s from accepting that they derive their satisfaction.

2. Define Factors For Your Job Satisfaction

Defining the factors for your own job satisfaction requires you jumping all the way back to the beginning. This could be your first job as, for example, a life guard in a day camp at 16 or a paper route at 12. However, instead of identifying duties, responsibilities, and  job descriptions as you might for a resume, look at your successes and the underpinnings of those successes. Underpinnings such as:

• Instinctive skills – the automatic, the intuitive, creative skills that you drew upon at that time
• Learned skills – that might be customer service, inventory control, basic accounting or program management

Don’t limit yourself to jobs either. You have successes from other experiences that may be relevant and transferable. An example is leading a youth group or charitable work through a church or synagogue, or writing a newsletter for your bowling league. Maybe even helping a parent or friend put together a website for a business.

3. Consider Other Successes Outside The Workplace

When you take this walk-through, consider the following: alumni associations, community and civic organizations, councils with which you may have been involved, teams on which you played, or Boards on which you served.

4. Identify Success Attributes

Once you have all these successes on the table, you can identify (a) actual skills, (b)personal characteristics, (c) professional characteristics and (d) knowledge areas, inherent or learned that you drew upon to succeed. These are the “underpinnings” or as I refer to them, success attributes, many of which may be derived from core competencies you possess. Don’t stop here!

5. Divide Motivated And Unmotivated Successes

On a piece a paper, set up a “T-Chart” with Motivated and Unmotivated Successeswritten across the top of your sheet as your left and right headings, respectively. Next, divide and list your “success attributes” defined in step 4 above, into your two groups under the headings.

• Motivated successes – those you are interested in perpetuating
• Unmotivated success – though they are successes, they are those which you have little or no interest in perpetuating

The motivated successes describe those skills, competencies, and attributes you not only work with and perform well, but enjoy doing – they motivate you. The others may also be skills, competencies, attribute areas with and in which you perform well, maybe even very well, but don’t hold your interest – they don’t motivate.

For example, maybe you’re terrific at editing research reports but don’t enjoy it. If your boss learns that you’re good at it, editing research reports might become 20% of what you do. Well, there goes 20% of your job satisfaction out the window. Agreed?

In other words, if you don’t think you’ll enjoy it, don’t get caught doing it!

Many people get caught doing something they don’t enjoy and it becomes part of their job. This will determine their level of angst – the most severe requires them to pull themselves out of bed every morning and drag themselves to work. How many people like that have you met in your life? They live for Fridays and vacations. Hey, life’s too short!

Once you have defined and thus classified your success attributes, you have laid the groundwork and are well on your way to defining the “best fit” for what might be your first career position after you’re graduated. With that done, you may be able to back up to the moment, the present time, and with some guidance from people you know and trust (family, peers, your school’s career development office, a career coach) you can begin to lay a path moving forward.

A friend once said to me, “If I knew job satisfaction was so elusive, I wouldn’t have spent half my life looking for it.” I asked him to define what job satisfaction for him would be. He said, “I’ll know when I find it,” hence the reason it’s been so elusive.

When you know what it is you can do, and moreover, want to do because you enjoy it most, you are in the best position to capitalize on the opportunities that await you in school, outside, and beyond. And, why? We are at our best when doing what we enjoy most.

Today, you take the first step!

Want Stronger Results? Try A Networking Resume

Trying to engage high-level decision-makers in your job search? Planning to contact recruiters or network during business meetings? You might find that these audiences quickly become overwhelmed with reading your full executive resume—or that a multi-page document is simply too much to handle in a busy networking situation.

The solution? A Networking Resume — a powerful sound bite that encapsulates your career in a single page and gets more traction in your search by supplying a quick picture of your bottom-line brand value.

Also called a Marketing Brief or Networking Biography, this single-page document allows you to zero in on what you want, while hitting the high points of your career. It’s especially useful for job hunters in the midst of person-to-person contact who want to avoid the hassle of tracking multiple sheets of paper.

Best of all, a Networking Resume is fairly simple to construct, especially after you’ve invested significant branding effort into writing your full-fledged executive resume. (See this example of a Networking Resume for a CEO & CEO candidate.)

How To Write A Networking Resume

Here are five easy steps to take when condensing your leadership expertise down into a potent, single-page marketing tool:

1 . Skip The Job Descriptions

There’s no room for lengthy explanations of teams led, budgets managed, and so forth. Instead, you’ll want to pull out some results-focused stories from your work history or a bullet-point executive accomplishment list that reflects the high points of your career.

2. Distill Your Career Into Titles, Dates, And Companies

A Work History section on your Networking Resume will present just the facts of each job in your career, and believe it or not, this can be very effective.

Often, recruiters will be skimming for progression in your background, and writing a short summary of your job titles can quickly demonstrate promotions and the increasing level of responsibility required for a leadership position.

3. Give Your Success Stories A Label And Some Context

The best part about writing a Networking Resume or Biography? Giving more detail on highlights of your work, using full sentences that pack in metrics and tell a well-rounded story.

While these items should be featured on a full resume, they rarely will be allowed the same breathing room. Consider fleshing out each Challenge-Action-Result story, highlighting up to three achievements.

4. Write A Branding Tagline That Speaks To Results

If you’ve been able to make significant impact as an executive, here’s the place to show it. Break your brand message down into a straightforward and condensed headline that describes how you get results (as shown here).

Struggling with this step? Keep condensing it, taking out words and refining the tagline until you have a powerful sentence that conveys impact. Here are some ideas:

Turning Around Challenged IT Organizations by Building Loyal, Productive Teams

Generating 650%+ Revenue Increase Through Competitive Market Strategies

5. Sum Up Your Education And Board Affiliations

Boil your educational background down into just a few lines, using common abbreviations for degrees, states, universities, and so on.

You’ll also want to cut to the chase on professional associations, speaking engagements, and volunteer affiliations; use the organization’s initials to conserve space; list keynotes with the word “Speaker,” followed by the name of the organization.

Now, you’re prepared to give a snapshot of your professional background and executive abilities to recruiters and hiring authorities, without worrying about information overload or excess paper.

You’ll still need a full resume for interviews, of course, but your new Networking Resume can serve as a value-packed, concise introduction to decision-makers.

5 Ways To Instantly Improve Your Job Search Results

By now, you’ve probably learned that the traditional ways of job searching don’t work anymore. A few years ago, you could put your resume up on Monster and CareerBuilder, and wait for the phone to ring. Those days are gone. So, here are five things you can easily do that will quickly improve your job search results:

1. Scan Your Resume For 15 seconds

That’s exactly what an employer will do, so if you don’t get a clear message about what you can do for them, then it is not a good resume. Since this is the most important document in your career, make the investment and have a good resume professionally prepared. Check out my FREE 10-point checklist on how to choose a resume writing service. (But be careful as there are many scams and mediocre providers out there.)

2. Focus On The High-Return Job Efforts

Job boards have less than a 5% effectiveness rate while networking has over a 50% effectiveness rate. Start by selecting 10 to 30 companies where you would love to work. Do a company search on LinkedIn and identify the decision makers and their staff.

Then, see who you know who might know someone who can make an introduction for you. Follow the company and people on LinkedIn and Facebook, join their groups and conversations, and comment on their blogs and become known. This is how you move from a passive wait for the right job to appear on the job boards to an active job seeker targeting the kinds of positions you really want.

3. Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

If a recruiter was searching through LinkedIn to find people for the position you are seeking, would you show up? Try it and if you are not on the first or second page, go back to your profile and pepper it with the right keywords to get yourself a higher ranking. A simple trick is to look at the profiles of the people who rank well and follow some of the things they did.

4. Review Your Online Presence

88% of employers will Google your name to see more about you. Make sure you look good on LinkedIn (100% complete profile), review your activity in Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and any other online account. Take down or change any comments that reflect poorly upon you. Use your own blog, online exchanges and testimonials to showcase your professional knowledge.

5. Create Measurable Goals

Searching for a job is like any other project and you must stay disciplined, so set firm goals for yourself. For example, “I will make 10 networking calls and have two meetings per week.” Make sure you are focusing on high-impact efforts like networking versus job board submissions. Keep a record of your efforts so if an employer calls, you can quickly determine when and how they were contacted.

Juggling Act: How To Balance An Internship With School

Completing an internship as an undergraduate student is an invaluable experience that can boost your resume, refine your communication skills, and expose you to the front lines of your area of study. In short: it’s a pretty awesome way to earn credits – or even a paycheck.  However, the time commitment required by most internships can be daunting, especially when taking a full course load.

How does one take on a position interning without letting his or her grades slip? What about maintaining a healthy sleep schedule and an active social life?

How To Balance An Internship With School

Believe it or not, it can be done. There is definitely no short-cut or hack to having it all in college, but developing a time management strategy and sticking to it will allow you to accomplish what you want to do without sacrificing your success in school or your sanity.

Plan Ahead

Consider when you are willing to take on an internship so that you are able to schedule accordingly. For example, it’s a good idea to apply to positions during the summer for a fall semester in which your course load will be lighter than usual. If you pair challenging classes in your weakest subject with a completely new, unfamiliar working situation, it will most likely make for a stressful term.

Commit To One Semester At A Time

How do you know if an internship opportunity is the right fit? It’s better to test the waters by committing to a semester versus a full-year. By the end of your first period of extraordinary multitasking, if you feel compelled to continue, you can voice that to your supervisor and they may offer you another semester, summer, or winter of work.  On the other hand, you won’t have to feel guilty backing out if you would rather spend the next term focusing exclusively on school.

Designate Chunks Of Time For Specific Activities

Perhaps the most important aspect of time management is actually controlling how much time is allocated to each responsibility. Commit entire blocks of time in your day or week to your internship along with class, studying, and other commitments you may have. Be liberal with the amount of time you’re allocating.  It’s better to overestimate than find yourself rushing or crammed for time.

In order to achieve this most effectively, many college students plan their academic schedules so that all classes fall on certain days, leaving two or three completely open per week to intern. The two settings will be easier to balance if they are kept separate. Cramming for an American History test at your desk in a professional office (or, conversely, responding to work emails in the middle of an Organic Chemistry lab) is an inefficient, unorganized, and distracting way to juggle your priorities. You’ll end up being incapable of giving 100% to anything you’re involved in.

Find New Ways To Increase Efficiency And Productivity

An increasing number of career-oriented students are taking online courses to better accommodate work hours. Online classes give students the flexibility to log on to a course from virtually anywhere. Rather than shuttle back and forth between campus and an internship, online students can save travel time and put that towards working or studying instead.

While interning and attending school simultaneously is a huge undertaking, all it takes is a little shuffling and patience to discover what works best for you.   The skills you’ll culminate during this process will serve you exponentially in the long run and build a foundation for long-term career success.

How To Write Your LinkedIn Profile When You’re Unemployed

This may sound odd, but if you’re unemployed, you actually have BETTER opportunities to promote yourself on LinkedIn than other users.

Openly displaying your personal brand and skills is simpler than fretting over the possibility that your boss is reviewing your Profile changes with suspicion.

Still, marketing yourself on LinkedIn when you’re openly seeking a new job can be daunting. What should you disclose about your job search and goals – and how much?

Use these tips for a strong LinkedIn profile – one that tells employers why you’re an asset to their organization, while capitalizing on your ability to freely promote your skills:

1. Your Headline

Here’s where you’ll want to ensure your value proposition (rather than your employment status) stands out. After all, your Headline is prime real estate—displayed in nearly every interaction you’ll have on the site AND the #1 most heavily weighted field in LinkedIn’s indexing scheme.

However, your employment status is NOT the brand message to send to employers. Instead, you’ll want to display a clear promise of value, while alluding to (but not directly stating) your job search.

These examples show how you can make your message clear to employers, without the negative connotation of “unemployed” in your Headline:

Senior Sales Rep, Top Producer. Consistent 124%+ of Quotas. Ready to Produce Results in  Manufacturing, SaaS, or Electronics

IT Director | VP of IT | Seeking New Infrastructure, Applications, or Networking Leadership Role in Managed Services Setting

2. Your Summary

Just like your Headline, the Summary can be used to deliver a direct message to employers—referring to your value proposition first and foremost.

In addition to a list of your career high points, consider starting your Summary with a message similar to this example:

Why consider adding me to your Operations or Supply Chain teams as an Analyst? I offer a strong, verifiable record of efficiencies that took XYZ Manufacturing’s shop floor and warehouse to a 32% drop in cycle time.

Note the keywords built into this introduction, telling employers this applicant is interested in an Operations Analyst or Supply Chain Analyst role.

You can also close your Summary with a call to action that states:

I’m eager to discuss requirements for a Business Development leader who can open multiyear sales opportunities at the CIO or CTO level, using a sales background in cloud services, hosting, managed services, and software.

In this example, Business Development, sales, CIO, CTO, and other industry-specific terms are all used as keywords to attract attention from the right employer.

3. Your Experience

If your employment ended only recently, you have several options. Some users leave the Profile as is for a few months, especially if they’re technically still “employed” by receiving severance pay. You may need to check with your former employer before doing this.

Another option is to simply give your former job an End Date on your LinkedIn Profile. While doing so will drop your Profile’s searchability (slightly), this is also the most straightforward way to show your current status.

In some cases, job seekers add a “current job” to give recruiters an idea of the title they’re seeking, while making it clear they’re currently unemployed. Should you decide to do so, a simple “COO in Transition” or “Sales Rep Open to Territory Responsibility” can serve to educate your Profile readers on your status.

The bottom line? Being unemployed is actually a GOOD reason to tend to your LinkedIn Profile with renewed enthusiasm.

If you use keywords and brand messaging appropriately – leveraging your ability to be more open in your search – you’re likely to gain increased traffic (and job opportunities) as a result.

7 Surprising Reasons You Didn’t Get A Call Back For That Job

It’s natural to wonder why you didn’t get an interview – or perhaps make it to the second round – for a job you thought was a perfect fit. While I always feel it’s best to ask the hiring manager what went wrong, do a little self-analysis first. Didn’t get a call back for the job? Perhaps you made one of the following mistakes:

1. You Didn’t Follow-Up, And Someone Else Did

At every part of the job search process, it’s important to follow up with the hiring manager. My general rule of thumb is to state you will follow up in one week on your cover letter. Thereafter, it’s appropriate to follow up once a week for a few weeks. You can e-mail the manager, give them a call, or even write them a small thank you note and drop it in the mail. A follow-up can make the difference between landing a job and being another submission in the pile.

2. You Didn’t Sell Yourself

When you walked into the interview, were you just desperate for a job, any job? Hiring managers can tell if you aren’t necessarily interested in their open position, and they will ask you questions accordingly. You need to be prepared to answer what your short-term and long-term goals are, how you can help the company and why your past experience makes you ready for this position. You also need to identify any weaknesses or areas of inexperience you have. Tell the hiring manager why they don’t need to worry about these.

3. The Position Was Filled By An Employee Referral

More often than not, referrals end up getting the job over online applicants.

4. You Didn’t Seem Passionate Or Interested Enough

Did you ask questions about the organization? Did you research it well, and identify how you can be of service to the company? Although job searching can be a frustrating and long process, you still need to convey your interest for the organization and position in order to seem like an ideal candidate.

5. You Didn’t Listen

A big red flag to a hiring manager is a candidate who doesn’t really answer the questions they’re asking. You need to be completely focused on all aspects of your search, whether it’s an e-mail correspondence or an interview.

6. You Didn’t Have Any Stories To Share

When managers ask about specific situations you’ve been in or mistakes you’ve made, you need to have a few interesting stories ready to tell them. Compile these stories from past experience and education.

7. You Didn’t Seem Natural

Smile. Relax. Take a breath. These sound simple—but many people can’t seem to do them in an interview! A hiring manager wants to get to know you, the real you. Although you still need to be professional, don’t be afraid to act naturally and be relatable.

What else would you add to this list? Have you done one of these and it cost you the job?

Top Career Torpedoes You Need To Avoid

Traveling along on our respective career paths, everyone should be aware of what potential landmines exist along the way that could prove to be obstacles to building a stellar reputation. Here are some of the biggest career torpedoes I’ve observed after working with literally 1,000+ clients over the past few years:

Shoulder-Lookers

There are the genuine networkers, and then there are the people we meet at events who are always looking above our shoulder to see if they can spot someone “better” in the crowd to go talk to. We know these people… they walk among us. If you are talking to someone, give them your full attention until the conversation has gracefully ended.

It sounds rather obvious, but don’t drop your current conversational partner like a hot potato as soon as Mr. Big walks in order to hightail it over there to shake his hand. Please don’t be one of THOSE people. They are users and totally FAKE… we all have long memories and aren’t likely to forget those types of rude indiscretions.

Endorsflation

Sounds like a great idea… “I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine” – a request many of us get on the networking site LinkedIn. Well, think again. Employers can smell these a mile away. ONLY post real, genuine, and heart-felt testimonials that are true insights into what makes you tick. Otherwise, to an outsider (a.k.a. a potential employer), these phony recommendations are just that: ineffective fluff.

Up-Titling

So, your last boss was really really stingy with the job titles, and the work you were doing far exceeded the lowly title that you had worked under. And yes, it is SOOOOO tempting to make a little, itty-bitty change to your job title from that employer… after all, it was a few years ago, and no one will notice, right?

WRONG.

Never ever take the liberty to creatively up-grade your actual job title. Employers don’t like that. And by employers, I mean potential employers AND your previous employer. Believe it or not, they DO and WILL talk / compare notes. Any way you look at it, it will turn out badly for you.

Date-Doctoring

If you started out as an assistant at the company but were later promoted to director, this newsflash is just in: it is not accurate to “lump” the entirety of your work history at the company on your resume under the higher job title. Most employers refer to this as LYING.

This is such obvious point but you would be surprised of how many job seekers take this tactic… only to their own detriment. What goes on your resume should parallel what is in the personnel file at previous employers.

In reality, showing the separate positions is actually GOOD for you – it demonstrates you were a valued employee and progressively promoted into increasing levels of responsibility.

Disposable Contacts

This doesn’t refer to those things you put into your eyes. We’re talking about the people who call you up, butter you up, get what they need from you, and then throw you away, never to be heard from since. No one likes to be used… and the only way you can build a strong network is to cultivate relationships… and that means for the long-term. And it is always important to be thinking about what you can do for the other person versus what they can do for you. Only when you make it about them will karma go to work for you.

Going Postal Online

Chances are, at some point in your life, you are going to have either a bad boss or someone who otherwise makes you feel disgruntled in your current job. A brief moment of satisfaction by venting online is only fleeting. What remains online stays there forever thanks to auto-archiving, and any negative rants can reside there until an employer does some digging for digital dirt.

A little while back, in my hometown, someone posted to an online local paper lambasting a development project and absolutely smeared the people involved. He thought his avatar was private, but he was wrong. He was outed and his true identity became known. Guess what? His employer didn’t like it and he got canned because it had such a negative impact on the company.

Remember what our moms used to say, “Don’t say anything if you don’t have anything nice to say?” Good advice that still holds wisdom today!

These are just a few tips for you to think about while managing your career and related documents. Always be thinking about how you can build positive, authentic relationships and reflect yourself accurately and consistently across all communications platforms. You want to make yourself as employable as possible and being as positive and genuine as you can be will help make career transitions much easier!

Career Truth 1: Brand Or Be Branded

Several people have told me lately they don’t care about their online career identity. This is what they think…

“I should be able to do what I want.”

“My life shouldn’t be judged by employers based on what they see on the web.”

I say this: brand or be branded. You can either make sure people “hear what they see” in a way that boosts your credibility. Or, you can ignore your online presence and be seen as A) non-existent and unimportant, or perhaps even worse, B) the Dennis Rodman of the Net.

Trust Me, You’re Going To Want To Read This Story!

A little while back, a young woman reached out to me, supposedly “desperate” about her job search. Having graduated college last spring without landing a single interview, she claimed to have ‘tried everything’ and was sure she was doing something wrong. I looked at her resume, which had some things that could be improved, but her academic achievements were solid and in a specialized field.

Then, I checked her cover letter. It was pretty standard, but not bad. This made me wonder if her online identity was the issue. So, I decided to complete an Internet search on her – just as four out of five hiring managers do today. I put in her name and the school she graduated from. What popped up in the results shed some light. The number one item in the results was her Facebook picture. It was a blurry photo of her in a sweatshirt and her eyes were closed. Okay, so it was nothing terrible, but it also wasn’t a powerful first impression.

What Followed Was Much Worse…

You see, her Facebook photo also happened to be the ONLY thing that popped up about her. Nothing related to school, nothing related to volunteering, nothing related to her field of study… absolutely nothing. In fact, the next 10 entries thereafter were for someone with the same name but different middle initial who currently writes a very open and direct blog about an alternative lifestyle subject.

Now, is it frustrating to think she might actually be getting discriminated against because of an online search? Of course! This recent grad doesn’t have a lot of experience, which means her career identity is being branded as sub-par (and maybe even misinterpreted) from lack of solid professional online content. Yet, that doesn’t mean a person with this problem should sit in the sandbox and pound their fists. Any person, at any age, at any time in their career can build a strong online career identity.

The reality is that you only need 5-6 good things to come up in a search, so the top fold (the uppermost portion of the computer screen that shows the top search results) is filled with positive items about you. Why? Because people rarely, if ever, bother to scroll down or click on the next page of a search. They usually assume what is in the top fold is the most relevant.

So, how do you create and/or improve your online career identity?

Step 1: Identify Your Brand’s Keywords

Do a search on yourself and see what comes up. You may find someone with your name has coveted the top fold. From there, identify what keywords you can use to differentiate yourself from this person. Should you be using your full name? Your middle initial? Your affiliation with an organization or a type of work? Figure out how you want people to find you so you can build your brand around these keywords.

Step 2: Become A Blog Reader & Commenter

Begin reading career-related content on blogs for 10 minutes daily. This will help you stay-up-to date and in-the-know. Then, start posting thoughtful, well-written, professional comments on these blogs related to your field of interest. Don’t know where to find these blogs?

Go to AllTop.com – they are like a magazine rack of online blogs. There, you’ll be able to find dozens of blogs related to your career aspirations so that you can post comments to enhance your credibility as a knowledgeable member of your field/industry. Better still, if you are reading this, you are on a blog RIGHT NOW. So, take two extra minutes to post a comment and you’ll be on your way.

Step 3: Ask To Guest Post & Become A Subject-Matter Expert

Once you’ve got commenting down, it’s time to consider writing a guest blog post on a subject related to your career. After you’ve become a regular commenter on a particular site and feel you relate to their readership, contact them and ask if they would accept a guest post from you. Give them an overview of the topic you would write about. If they are interested, you can write the whole article, submit it, and voila – you are a published author on the Net.

Step 4: Get Your Twitter Brand Up And Running

Finally, get a Twitter account and learn the three key phases for leveraging its power for your career. Twittering is micro-blogging. Better still, it’s like instant messaging for professionals. It is an easy, fast way to connect with hundreds of like-minded people in a short period of time. You can be connected to 1,000’s of people in a matter of weeks. Better still, you can “tweet” to them which a hiring manager can read if they do a search on your Twitter account name. So, it’s like inviting an employer to see what you are like to converse with. A great way to brand yourself!

Does this sound like too much work? It’s really not, I promise. But, even if it does take a little effort, it’s worth it.

Here’s An Example:

One of our interns joined the marines and was deployed in Iraq. He did this so he could pay for college. When he came back to the university, he was contacted by a student who wanted to write a story about his experience. He’s an extremely humble person, but agreed to do the interview. The story posted online and it is an incredible look at what life is like there.

Now, he never told myself or the rest of our team about this. Actually, with his permission, I was the one that shared this online story with his fellow interns; many of whom have become friends with him in the last year and didn’t even know he served in the war.

So, how did I know?

As his potential employer, I looked him up. You can imagine how much his credibility went up in my mind when I saw and read the story. And, since joining our internship, he’s also begun blogging. At this point, he has a pretty incredible top fold – and he’s only a junior!

In summary, it’s like I said… brand or be branded.

Why risk having a lack of any career identity or a bad online presence just because you didn’t take control of the situation? Yes, getting your top fold to look good takes a little effort, but it can provide an incredible return on your time and energy investment.

5 Tips For Getting The Most Out Of Big Conferences

We all know the importance and benefit of going to annual industry or careerconferences. The two biggest benefits for me have been learning new things, ideas, approaches, and getting to meet in person people I have been impacted by.

There are so many amazing people who I have met through my social marketing platforms and activities. My Blogtalk Radio Show has opened so many doors for me to feature and profile people who are doing really great things with their lives, careers, and businesses. Authors, entrepreneurs, empowered women, career professionals, and journalists all using social platforms to advance their causes, brands, and benefits. Having the opportunity to share these people with my sphere has been so much fun!

How To Get The Most Out Of Big Conferences

Attending a big conference is really no different than any other in person networking event you attend, other than it’s huge and the choices are expansive. Here are five preparation tips I use to get the absolute most out of my big conference experiences:

1. Prepare Yourself

Make sure you are mentally and emotionally ready to interact with a large group at big events. This is not a small, intimate group. Get your persona ready to make a bold statement. How you look, what you say, how well you interact with groups or one on one. What do you want people to know about you, do you know everything you need to about the people you want to meet? You may have a minute or two with people. Prepare your “short story pitch.”

2. Choose The Sessions That Best Serve Your Goals Now

Commit to the sessions that best advance your personal and business goals now. By just being in those sessions, you will meet other people who are there with similar goals. Go to sessions that can advance your learning, expertise and networking with the ‘right’ people.

3. Focus On How People Have Impacted You

When you get time with whoever it is you want to meet, lead with how they have helped or impacted you. Use specific examples. We all need that confirmation what we do is actually helping others. Knowing that is a huge motivational plus that drives us to keep going!

4. Have Specific Goals In Mind

Why do you want to meet certain people? Do you see possibilities for collaboration? Do you share complimentary niches? Would you like to be a guest blogging or invite them to be on yours? With limited time, having specific reasons and goals in mind can yield very effective results.

5. Timely Follow Up

Follow up with a sincere thank you and outline any specific things discussed that need to be developed or attended to. Tweet, post, and blog about your personal experience being at the sessions, networking, and parties, and especially meeting them!

How do you prepare for big conferences? What are your best practices that maximize your networking?