A recent round of Tweets noted that: “85% of recruiters influenced by positive online rep, study from Microsoft.” The full quote from the original study: “Positive online reputations matter. Among U.S. recruiters and HR professionals surveyed, 85% say that positive online reputation influences their hiring decisions at least to some extent. Nearly half say that a strong online reputation influences their decisions to a great extent.”
I figured that if recruiters were working this hard to check me out on the Internet I ought to do a little checking myself. Hal Amens is a pretty unique name so I figured it should be easy. It was. Just one other person showed up on Google: Hal Amen (no “s”). Like me a writer and a traveler: http://matadortrips.com/. There are enough photos of each of us on my site and his that no recruiter should ever be confused about who was who.
But just to be sure, I searched on “Hal Amens” — quotes added — and a quick review of the top 95 were all mine except a couple for my dad who has the same name with a different middle initial. Google says it found “about 2,240 for ‘hal amens’” I didn’t bother to check all of them.
What happens if you have a common name? Google reports, “about 50,000,000 (that’s 50 million) for bob smith” Pity the recruiter looking for information about Bob. And, there is bound to be some bad stuff in there about “bob.” Putting your photo on any of your sites on the Net may be a good idea.
Google is probably your best place to search. One Web post suggested also checking http://pipl.com One of their sources cited 13 references for me. Eleven were for me. One noted that my father, also Harold Amens but with a different middle initial, is on the phone bill for the condo were we live. He passed away long before we used his name. Another noted that Harold R. Amens, (my grandfather) was in attendance at the founding of the Masonic lodge in Henderson Nevada in 1931. Wow! That’s in-depth research.
I have a set of links on the bottom of my resume; the usual: Linkedin, Twitter, etc. Just to minimize the risk that some recruiter will confuse me with the other traveler, I have added a Google link with quotes to my list of links. Maybe if I help recruiters with their job, they will be more inclined to help me find a job.
For those of you who have common names that have millions of Google links …? Good luck.
Related links: Google yourself? You betcha; Have you googled yourself lately?; Google Yourself
Other tracking tools: socialmention
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