Brand-Yourself (before someone else does it for you)

A year or so ago, I was having lunch with a former colleague, and the topic turned to having NetGen-ers working for you. She's the VP of Marketing for a company aimed at this slice of the demographic, and most of the folks working for her fall into it. She mentioned that she was in hiring-mode for two positions, but had not made offers to two promising candidates based of what she'd seen about them online.

By most standards, the "problems" this hiring manager found weren't all that major: no felony conviction; no membership in the American Nazi Party; no shoving-the-hyper-kitty-cat-in-the-bong video. Just a couple of personal blog posts that made making an offer slightly problematic for her.

In one, a young woman who was applying for a job that involved budgeting wrote about her inability to keep her personal financial life in order - credit card balances, bounced checks, Mommy-Daddy bailouts. No doubt typical blogosphere histrionics and humor. Yet enough to push my friend to make the offer to an equally qualified candidate who wasn't caught laughing about her lack of financial acumen in public.

The other rejected candidates had a couple of posts about getting hammered and missing work. Again, the posts may well have been complete exaggerations. But do you want to take a chance on hiring someone who might not show up for work on Fridays and Mondays? My friend didn't.

I don't know whether she ever let these two know why they didn't get the job. It certainly would have been a useful service if she had. At least the two would have known to delete troubling posts - or maybe to start blogging anonymously.

Whether my friend provided useful service or not, there is an outfit that provides what I think is providing an absolutely essential service in this arena.

Brand-Yourself, the brainchild of three Syracuse University students - Pete Kistler, RJ Sherman, and Trace Cohen - is a resource for helping people create and maintain an online identity that's positive. Brand-Yourself does this by helping you figure out what's the value/merit of what's out there to begin with; making recommendations for improving your web presence; keeping tabs on it (think: Michael Phelps); and creating a site of your own that let's you control your image.

In the process of establishing a web presence - or re-establishing your web presence - you'll be making sure that the recruiters and hiring managers who (guaranteed!) are googling you will find the good stuff - and not your true confessions, which with any luck will now be relegated to the nether pages pulled up by a search engine. (You'd have to one hell of an obsessive-compulsive to look beyond page one.  And speaking of page one, while I come up first when I google Maureen Rogers, the equine consultant and herbalist Maureen Rogerses aren't far behind. And there, on the bottom of page one, I also see that Maureen Rogers died in Waterford, Ireland, last January 25th which - eerily - was the 38th anniversary of my father's death. Queue celestial choir music.)

Personally, this Maureen Rogers is not a huge fan of the notion of "Brand You". When I hear the term, by unbranded little brain starts thinking of hundreds of millions of self-absorbed narcissists trying to position themselves against hundreds of millions of other self-absorbed narcissists. And then my unbranded little brain goes numb. (Perhaps this because I came of age when Tide and Kellogg's were brands, and what people knew and thought about you was called "reputation," a concept that now seems quaint and passé. Who wants a boring old reputation when they can have a brand!)

This is, however, a mere quibble.

Brand is the term du jour, so brand it is.

And the web - as we used to say in the dot.com era - changes everything. So managing an online identity is essential. In this light, Brand-Yourself is an excellent idea. Especially for Net-Geners. (On second thought, it's not a bad idea for Gen-X or Boomers, either.)

Especially in this market, the first impression someone gets from you had best not be a MySpace clip of your throwing up, or the libelous comments some anonymous moron's making about you on the execrable JuicyCampus. And, of course, making sure you have a strong and positive web presence will certainly help you gain credibility in certain professions (e.g., marketing).

Speaking of marketing, while I'm giving props to Brand-Yourself's concept, how about a little marketing shout-out about their concise and pithy tag line:

We make it easy to establish a web presence that makes you more hirable.

Fourteen words! Way to go, guys.

 

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Here's an earlier post on JuicyCampus, and another about the career-limiting cameos some South Carolina students made in the movie Borat.