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What you post on the Internet might come back to haunt you when you go looking for a job. Some employers are searching the Web to see what is out there about you.
If you apply for a job at Firm Holdings in Shrewsbury, you should probably just assume that someone there is going to search the Web for your name or call up your posts on MySpace.com.
“It only takes five minutes to do,” said Robert Chiafullo, president of the real estate and financial investment company. “It gives you an idea of the guy that you are hiring.”
He did a search on one job candidate and up came a MySpace page with “explicit” content, he said. “I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t hire him because of that reason,” Chiafullo said.
Chiafullo is not alone. Employers are clicking on the Web to check out an applicant’s background, interests and accomplishments. Some also are using the Web to check a candidate’s claims. Did he or she really lead that project?
Nearly eight in 10 executive recruiters use search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, to check backgrounds online, according to a survey by ExecuNet Inc., an executive job search and recruiting company. Of those, 35 percent have eliminated a job candidate from consideration based on what they found, up from 26 percent a year ago.
“I think it’s very important to understand that a lot of this information people are going to see before they pick up the telephone, before you have the opportunity to explain what you were doing and why,” said Dave Opton, ExecuNet’s founder and chief executive officer. “They’re making that judgment absent any other information.”
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