What’s on your executive networking profile?

I’ve written in the past a bit about Google and what your prospective employer might find out about you on the Internet. (I’ll just add this brief refresher: Google yourself and see what comes up. And know that it’s highly likely hiring managers and recruiters will see this, too.)

Google doesn’t capture everything, though. What happens behind the password-protected worlds of networking websites is beyond their indexing ability – but it’s still searchable by the hiring managers and recruiters who might also be members.

A cautionary tale comes from the younger job seekers. Facebook, a huge networking site, is collaborating with Jobster, an employment website, and allowing people’s Facebook profiles to appear in their Jobster profiles.

Now, I’m not about to suggest that everyone in Facebook has a bunch of photos of themselves in the midst of drunken revelry. But Facebook caters to undergraduate students, so you can imagine some of what’s on there. And when prospective employers look at a candidate’s Facebook profile…well, for the ones with the drunken photos, you can imagine how much that hinders a job hunt.

But let’s talk about the more serious networking sites, like LinkedIn and their ilk. There are two levels to the information you put on these sites. One is the professional information you want to share with other members (and people who might come looking for you). Especially if you’re sending out resumes right now, check your profile and make sure it reflects you well. Not as the executive you are, but as the executive you’re aiming to become.

But I’ve also heard concerns about sharing information on sites like these as well – revealing age, ethnicity, and family status. We all know no one’s supposed to discriminate against these things. We all know there are a few bad apples out there who do it anyway. And if they can’t discriminate with info from a networking site, they’ll find other ways to do it.

I’d like to suggest that you wouldn’t want to work for those folks anyway, so please, don’t worry about sharing that kind of information. Networking is about creating personal connections, and (without crossing into the TMI zone), the more information about yourself you can share online, the better chance you have of someone reading that info and finding something of common interest.

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