[Web Wednesday] Guest Post: The Importance of Maintaining a Professional Reputation Online

Worky is a professional social network that aims to cut through the mess of online data prevalent today and promote you and your brand.  In this guest post they explore how to protect your online identity – and keep potential employers away from your sordid past!

Although we may not willingly admit it, most of us have, at some point, searched for ourselves on Google to see what our virtual alter ego looks like. Few people, however, review the results from a professional perspective.   With most online-savvy individuals putting their name to a host of online social profiles, blogs and photo-sharing sites, it has never been easier for employers – current or potential – to discover things about us that they won’t find out in a 30-minute interview, usually because it’s not legal to ask.

According to a recent study carried out by Microsoft, 41% of HR professionals in the UK have rejected a candidate because of what they found online. Worky is a new social networking site which helps users to build up and control their professional online reputation, a valuable service in this age of the digital CV and online portfolio.

There are a number of quick fixes for controlling your existing online reputation: deleting potentially detrimental material you know to exist, adjusting your existing social profile privacy settings and, most importantly, doing your utmost to ensure that ‘inappropriate’ content never makes its way onto the web in the first place. Another way to re-order your Google search results is to set up a professional profile, one which ranks well above your random Twitter thoughts or MySpace misdemeanors.

Worky provides exactly this service. What sets Worky apart when it comes to managing your online reputation is its search engine optimisation and Google analytics features. With the service, it’s possible to manage how your profile is found and, if it is, allows you to monitor who is looking at it.  In their study, Microsoft also discovered that the majority of HR professionals asked are influenced by a positive online reputation. They say: “an online reputation is not something to be scared of; it’s something to be proactively managed.”   So embrace the ‘Google Factor’; When handled correctly it can be a professional’s greatest asset.