by Deborah Ng
I began writing for the web in 2000 and participated in forums and discussions even before that. Some of the things I wrote back in the day are still online. In fact, when I see a lot of my earliest writing i cringe. Not necessarily because it’s bad (and some of it is) but because I sometimes I didn’t necessarily think about what i put out there.
Online is forever. No, really. Even things we thought we deleted can be found through search engines such as the Wayback Machine or old blogs and forums.
An employer wrote me the other day and said she Googled the top candidate for a job and found some of the things she said here and on another forum that weren’t so complimentary about a past employer and changed her mind about hiring her. I think it’s a good lesson to be careful what we put out there.
Businesses now do a web search of potential employees. Not only do they run names through Google but they also check MySpace, LiveJournal, FaceBook and other places.
There are two things I learned having an online presence all these years:
1. What you say will come back to haunt you eventually. It may not be for years, but if you say something embarrassing or controversial evenutally someone will find it.
2. You’re not as anonymous as you think you are. Even if you hide behind an alias or variety of aliases it’s easy enough to find out who you are. You reveal different things about yourself at the different places you visit and eventually people put two and two together.
People love the anonymity of being online. They feel it empowers them to say whatever they want with no repercussions but this isn’t always the case. Think before you type because you never know who is watching.
P.S. Speaking of going back, want to see something fun? Here’s a look at the early days of FWJ. At first it was a webpage on the Writers Row website, but soon it evolved into a blog. You may be surprised at some of my rules - I forgot about this but back in July 2005 I wasn’t posting any leads paying under $5! Now that’s embarrassing! And here’s a look at Finding the Right Words. I merged the two blogs to become the FWJ you see today. Yeah I cringe, but it all made me what I am today. This is my first online paying job - a humor column I had from 2001 - 2004 with Suite 101.com. In fact, this item even won an online humor award - other stuff from that era doesn’t seem as funny now as it was then. Enjoy the blast from my past.
July 12th, 2008 at 9:07 am
@ Deb: ((applauding)) Great post!
July 12th, 2008 at 9:12 am
@ Deb: I remember finding and reading your post entitled “The Trade Off” at Finding the Right words and thinking, “Man, I want to be like her.” I never dreamed that I would someday be working with you. Just goes to show you that you never know what the future holds and what circumstances will bring people together.
July 12th, 2008 at 10:16 am
Great post Deb. The employer that wrote to you and their resulting search for a potential employee only confirms what you and most of us have been saying here at FWJ and at other sites about being very careful of what you type/say.
Thanks for this.
July 12th, 2008 at 11:20 am
It’s absurd for anyone to assume that every past job was perfect and the people who ran the company were perfect angels.
I’m wondering if the candidate is better off without the job after all.
July 12th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Hi- Jodee and just look at you now running the joint.
Hi Jenny - When I was an editor for LoveToknow someone wrote a nasty letter to me about the pay ($15 at the time). Then when I was looking to hire a writer for another business she applied again. I didn’t hire her because if she was so rude she’d send a nasty letter to someone she didn’t work for, how difficult would she be with me? I do think it’s always a good idea to practice good manners.
Hi Ann - I think it’s a given some people will leave jobs and be disappointed in the way things turned out. If I were to hire someone I don’t think I’d consider the person who badmouths all his or her previous employers online because I could be next - and that’s bad for my business and my brand. So I do understand it.
July 12th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
One thing that always amuses me about folks googling my name is that there is more than one person out there with my name. I frequently get emails from folks looking for at least three different versions of me out of my area — one in the UK, another in New York, and a third in Oklahoma — plus another in Chicago, where I am from.
So I just have to hope that anyone googling my name is smart enough to use discretion in knowing which bad pieces of writing are mine and which belong to another Amy. Fortunately, the types of jobs I apply to are for people who are likely much too busy to sit around googling their applicants and looking to see if I have a myspace. (I hope, since the myspace listed under my name last I checked belonged to an angsty teen.) One more reason to change my name to Zelda.
July 12th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Sigh. I suppose this means I have to take down the picture on my old website where I’m cleaning out my office, wearing the t-shirt that says “University of You Suck”.
July 12th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Oh, I started out with that same green Blogger theme, Deb! Then I switched to a few others and eventually moved to WordPress with my current theme, which I had designed. It is so neat to see how you grew, changed, and how FWJ evolved to what it is now. It’s wonderful, and I’m so happy for you!
@Amy - Zelda suits you.
*smiles*
Michele
July 12th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
I’m with Amy, you have to hope they use discretion. I had found something that Technorati was attributing to me. It was a porn site that had a health site type of URL (I was writing weight loss, diet and nutrition topics), and it came up on google. One of those “Violette wrote…” type of things.
It was highly offensive and I have no idea how my name was attributed to it. I had no content on there, I doubt there were any linkbacks. I emailed Technorati and never got a response but I think they must have done something because it hasn’t popped up in my search anymore (or I have so much content now that it has moved down the google chain), but I do find lots of other things that are not related to me at all as well, and most of them show up as Technorati.
July 12th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
I try hard to temper what I’m saying, too. You never know who’s going to find you, whether it be via google, linkedin, forums, facebook, myspace, twitter… the list goes on and on.
My name is quite common. In addition to a famous Canadian skier, there’s a playmate w/my name, too. Let’s hope potential employers can tell the difference.
July 12th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Very wise advice. I’m always thinking about how my writing reflects on me as a person. Although, I try to be fair in comments, I had never really thought about that aspect coming back to haunt me.
Funny about the Suite 101. I struggled with whether or not I should write for them to get my work up online when starting out. While I make little money I have to say it hasn’t been a waste of time. A wellness company found my profile on there and I now write for their ezine - my best, highest paying gig yet!
July 12th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
@Lori - Suite 101 used to pay a monthly stipend for anywhere from one to for posts a month. Most of us left when they stopped paying altogether. Now I’m hearing they pay again but not much.
July 12th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
I have to wonder about employers or anyone for that matter who take the time to digg around to find out who anonymously posted something. I have better things to do with my time them check out MySpace, Facebook, etc. for people I can considering hiring.
I believe there is a certain amount of anonymity online. Yesterday I Googled my user name for WAHM and I find only two entries out of 300 I posted. Both offered advice to writers. Some companies delete forum posts from their servers because it is expensive to keep storing all that data.
I recently hired someone who gave me one name on her resume and another variation on the Paypal invoice. I Googled both names. The resume name came up blank. For the Paypal name the very first entry (and most ertries for the first 2 pages) told me that 10 years ago she was a stripper and phone sex operator. I know it was the same person because she wrote about doing these jobs to pay her tuition at 123 University. There were other details also that confirmed it was the same person I hired.
I think people have more to worry about than not getting jobs due to online posts. Other info about your life such as past occupations or public info about criminal background, bankruptcy, foreclosure, etc. can also be found online. Since many people are so judgmental some employers will always find a reason not to hire you.
July 12th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Hi Louise -
Many companies, About.com for instance, do background checks and Internet searches for the people who work for them. In most cases it’s to make sure they’re not hiring criminals but sometimes they stumble upon an old forum or blog post and think…hmmm…do I really want to hire this person?
The same with the real world, many human resources departments have people on staff who look up potential employees online to make sure they’re not the type of people who will spend the day online social networking or complaining or giving away company secrets.
It used to be businesses took their chances when hiring - hoping their employees told the truth on their applications. With the Internet they can take the background check a step further.
July 12th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Hi Amy,
There are several Deborah Ngs online. One is a child chess prodigy and another is a writer for CNN and there are even more than that.. We do have to hope employers choose the correct Deborah Ng when Googling for information.
July 12th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
The sad part is that all this checking may not mean much. Decades ago the author of What Color Is Your Parachute said that people didn’t know how to hire the right person. I think that is still true today. For my last job with a Fortune 500 company I was interviewed by six people, provided four references (all of whom were called) and even had to submit the transcripts from college and post-grad work. I am also certain they did a background check because I would be dealing with confidential and proprietary info. I had no online presence at the time because I never visited forums and I didn’t have a blog. The only thing I didn’t have to do to get the job was pee into a cup. After a few weeks on the job I realized it was not a good fit and eventually came to loathe the job.
There is no formula for how to find the best candidate for the job. I guess it is hit or miss no matter how much time and effort and money you put into checking out potential applicants. While doing all this checking may eliminate potential trouble makers, it doesn’t mean that the person hired will work out either.
July 12th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
@ Deb: I’m still pinching myself - ouch!
July 12th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
OK, now you’ve got me all paranoid… I don’t post on blogs or boards with my real name, but I just took a link to a board I moderate off my blog. Because my professional site links to my blog, and if you clicked on the link to that board and had time to waste, you could figure out which one was my username unless you were very dense.
I hope an employer wouldn’t have THAT much time to waste but… well, I guess I don’t really need that link there either!
July 12th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
I “google” myself(that sounds bad) every once in a while. I’ve been writing online for eight years. Today I got a blast from the past with suite101, epinions, and my book reviewing. I read client feedback(positive, thankfully) for a project I did on one of those bid sites. I didn’t even realize the feedback was there.
I found sites I forgot I had signed up for. That happened after I changed email addresses after going from dial-up to DSL, and I forgot those sites had my old email address. Those sites were minor though. I even found something I wrote over ten years ago. It wasn’t a professional piece; it was about a medical condition from a patient’s perspective. That was my first online writing. I’ve never posted on blogs and forums much so that doesn’t come back to haunt me. If you have a long Internet history, it’s worth “googling” yourself.
July 13th, 2008 at 12:40 am
I`m glad that I have a very unique name . . . the only other things that tend to come up on Google are scientific papers (apparently a lot of scientists with my last name and Genesis fits right into the science terminology) and the band.
So the rest is all me and thank goodness I never wrote anything embarrassing online!
Most of the time I don`t bother with being “anon”, though I do use different names to differentiate between blogs, but I link to my personal blog from my business one and vice versa. My thinking is that if people want to find out more about me, they can, so I might as well make it easy!
July 13th, 2008 at 4:54 am
Wise words, Deb!
Yes, I think that whereas what you say in day-to-day conversation will only be recalled by people who were there at the time, and then only if they can actually remember it, which frequently they don’t, what you say online is there forever, (almost). So you do have to be careful about what you say, and not get too carried away in the heat of the moment.
You also have to be a bit careful about the amount of personal information you leave online. I ran into an old friend on the train, and he told me that he used MySpace. So later on I took at look at his MySpace page - well, up there he had his annual income, his personal circumstances, his photo, etc. I don’t think I would go quite that far! All he needs to do is to put his address up there, and the burglars may well come calling, looking to reap some spoils of that fine income of his.
When online, I think it’s always a case of, think before you write.
July 13th, 2008 at 11:50 am
This is so true… and super scary to consider the consequences *gulp* … I think I’ve in general been good… and it’s always good to do a “vanity” search, just to make sure.
July 13th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Hi Deb, excellent post and I enjoyed the history lesson!
Online reputation management is something with which we should all be concerned. I have google alerts set for my name and my company name. I also use addictomatic daily to find out what is being said about both. I have sometimes found improper uses of my company name (linked to porn) and without checking regularly I cannot manage my online identity. On a positive note it also keeps me alert when my name is mentioned in blog posts, etc as a reference point. I always counsel clients to manage their reputation online and that includes watching what you say, just as you should offline. Gee, Jesse Jackson could have used our advice recently, sure would have saved him some embarrassment. 
July 13th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
I find it pretty scary to think that things you don’t think still exist are still around to haunt you. I read another blog today about how a woman had a school system use old blog entries against her when she ended up in special education hearings for her child.
I’m feeling very…exposed at the moment, and a little paranoid.
July 13th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
I forgot to mention that I have a name in common with someone else. She’s a model so I probably won’t be mistaken for her!
July 14th, 2008 at 8:39 am
I went digging through the archives of my eight-year-old blog and wanted to delete a lot of entries. I know better not to. However, I’m grateful I didn’t say anything mean, talk about someone, or do any antics that would come back and bite me. So in those terms, I’m fine with what I’ve written.
My daughter talks a lot online and in myspace. I’ve told her repeatedly that I know she’s a teen — but eventually she’ll have a job and her employer could look for her stuff online without any regard to her age at the time of posting.
Let’s hope employers will overlook the typical antics of teens. I know many teens who grow up to be fine young adults after high school graduation.
July 14th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Late as usual adding to the discussion, but I’m sure it won’t surprise any of you to find that I completely agree with Ann. Heck, not only do I have no qualms about stating the ugly facts about my bad business dealings, I make absolutely no attempt to conceal my identity. I believe the job candidate referred to dodged a major bullet by being passed over for the position. Anyone who would red flag her for being honest and asserting her first amendment rights would likely prove problematic to work for down the road. If that employer knew s/he would never act the way the former employer did, why would s/he have anything to worry about? Not someone I’d want to be dealing with … especially if I were counting on her/him for reliable income.
July 15th, 2008 at 12:28 am
If the person is warning other writers about a potential employer that does not pay for instance, I personally would be happy that he or she took the time to warn other writers about the company online.
July 23rd, 2008 at 8:22 am
Actually, that is a good point from Scribette - warning other freelancers about non-payers is quite important and useful.
I have occasionally been troubled by non-payers, but there are ways of sniffing them out in advance - they are the ones that say what they want from you, but then seem to go all vague when money is mentioned.