What is your Online Reputation?

It is important to examine your online reputation and know what your “digital footprint” looks like to others when they search for you. This is just as important for companies as it is for candidates looking for work. This topic touches my life in many ways, guiding my activities as an Executive Recruiter at Cochran, Cochran & Yale, as an Adjunct Professor (RIT and SUNY Brockport) and as a mother raising her children.

Business Reputation

I worked at Robert Half International for eight years. Current employees found it entertaining to check out the career intelligence on “Vault.com” - an active bulletin board full of personal opinions and feelings - and read the comments former employees made about the company and even certain RHI employees. It was unsettling to discover a publicly-traded company could have a dark side so publicly available. Any potential employee or client could check out the “online reputation” of the company as seen through the eyes of anyone who cared to write a review.

All of the information I have on the web is there because I put it there: my blog, my LinkedIn page, my Twitter account all are carefully executed. I do not have a social link online - arguably because of the set ways of my generation communicating differently, but certainly also by design. I want my visible online reputation to be solely professional, leaving my life outside the office private. You can call me old fashioned, but I think it should be that way – so too, do most of the “decision makers” in the business world of the early 21st century.

Candidate Reputation

For candidates entering into the market this concept is even more important. A major element in my course syllabus at Rochester Institute of Technology and The State University of New York at Brockport is “managing your public information”. The clean up phase should start before you enter into the workforce and should be something everyone online is thinking about every time they post to a blog or upload a photo.

This day and age anyone can be an online publisher and upload information to the web, and many social problems can result from these activities. I recommend people for hire every day and one of the first places I go to check a potential candidate out is the internet. Facebook, Myspace, Google and LinkedIn all of these provide a permanent digital record of your life, if your personal information is online there is a chance that anyone can find it. You do not want to be looking for a job and have an outrageous high school or college photo of you surface online portraying you in a compromising environment or doing something illegal. These photos might have been ok and “cool” at the time but will not represent you well with a prospective employer.

In the end all we have is our integrity. It is a result of the decisions we have made in our life, how we interact with people and how we impact the lives of those around us. The principles we will not compromise will set us apart from the rest. You should assume everything you do can be photographed with a cell phone or taped with a microphone and act in a manner that you would be proud of.

- Kym Bailey

"It should be easy to find the right person - unemployment is still so high."

"We've had this position open for six months, advertised it constantly, interviewed 28 people - haven't come close to making an offer."

These are comments I hear regularly in talking to clients. What's wrong with this picture?

Well, not much. Those observations are accurate.

Although unemployment remains high, the fact is that the more impact-making a person's track record is, the more specific his or her skills are, the less likely it is that the person is actively pursuing a new opportunity. This is borne out by regular outreaches I do to a broad base of contacts. The "yes I'm still available - what do you have?" and "I'm really eager to switch jobs again" responses come principally from people with little or no sustained track record of accomplishment. The "job is going well, thanks for checking" and "can't believe it, but just got a good promotion" responses tend to come from the people who any company would covet - but clearly, these people feel happy in what they are currently doing.

So a friendly (and admittedly self-serving) reminder that, even in a "recovering" economy, companies looking for good talent, even in a market supposedly rich in candidates, are likely to need to approach specific people, with a track record of accomplishment that aligns with the company's need.

Where has hiring been taking place in the first half of the year?

As usual, medical devices and food, two areas with a firm base of demand coupled with steady growth, have been strong. General and specialty manufacturing companies have been strong as well, more so than the impression one would get from listening to business news.

Independent of title, the common theme I'm seeing among interviewed and hired candidates is their ability to optimize processes, improve quality, "get more from less" and stand out as the contributor who most makes the whole be more of the sum of the parts. People like that turn the losses of a struggling company into a profit; they help a profitable company suddenly have a bit more money to invest in better equipment or new product development - and they help companies seemingly already hitting on all cylinders find record growth.

But again, by and large, these people are employed, well-compensated, and usually happily challenged, so they need to be approached in a way that outlines the benefits of perhaps doing something else.

In terms of what CCY as a whole has seen this year, it's a confusing but promising picture that perhaps maps to the economy in general.

We started the year with more searches than we normally do at that point. Many took longer than expected - likely a function of good candidates being harder to find than it initially appeared. Realigning our search processes and contacts has positioned us for a strong second quarter, and with the quarter closing in on its final weeks, we're again seeing a resurgence of new companies reaching to us for help.

Wishing you a good summer - one that keeps you busy enough to not worry about fall, yet well-paced enough to enjoy while it lasts. Please reach to me if I might help you in any way.