written by Sue, career counselor

I heard someone referring to the ‘new’ resume recently and I was wondering what they meant.  I came to find out that they were referring to the new resume as anything an employer can discover about you on the Internet.  I did some research and found one study that said 77% of employers are googling job applicants.  Yet another one indicated that 86% of recruiters are googling candidates.  And, as reasoning would follow, there are plenty of stories out there about candidates being ruled out based on what was learned through googling and other on-line candidate probing.  I also read the following quite interesting story through a blog from Harvard Law School (located at the following link if you want to read the entire blog entry) http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/infolaw/2006/11/15/finnish-employers-cannot-google-applicants/

…an unsuccessful job applicant who previously attended a conference on mental health as a patient’s representative. During a job interview, the man discovered that in addition to his resume and the education exam certificates he had provided, his potential new employer had documents resulting from an Internet search that referred to aspects of his personal life, including his participation in the mental health conference. However, the information at the employer’s disposal did not clarify the applicant’s status at the conference, leading the employer to surmise that the potential employee could have had a mental health disorder

The key focus of this blog is that Finland bans employers from googling applicants while the U.S. doesn’t.  Now isn’t that interesting!  I don’t expect you’ll be moving to Finland anytime soon so the advice here is to ‘google yourself’ before you go job hunting and see what you find (you can use other search engines as well).  There’s always a chance you might be able to edit your ‘new’ resume before an employer sees it.

Until next time…
Sue Posluszny
www.careeroptions4me.com

For more information about me and my qualifications, please click here.