Happy New Year everyone! We here in the Office of Alumni Career Management hope that you have had a wonderful holiday season and are starting the new year off with a bang!
This time of year always brings new year’s resolutions, and desires for self-improvement. Though we often see many new clients approaching us with desires about finding a new job, we recognize that a new gig isn’t necessarily everyone’s goal. However, whether you’re looking to start something new, or simply looking to refresh your own personal brand (hint: you definitely should be), we have a few tools that can help you along the way with that.
This week’s tools you can use focuses on two awesome tools that will support you in cultivating a strong, professional brand presence online. As we all know, the internet is an ever present part of our lives these days. We have long since surpassed the days where social media was this “new” thing that “the kids” were into – now it seems that everyone has a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn profile. And while you may not be one of “the kids” any more, it is likely that you’ve had these accounts for quite a while. If so, there’s a possibility that you may have said or done something (maybe years ago) online that is now coming back to haunt you in your current life. The worst part? You might not even know/remember what it is.
That’s where our tools you can use come in! Our tools this week are WillMyTweetsGetMeFired? and Brand Yourself.
The first tool, WillMyTweetsGetMeFired? is pretty much exactly what it sounds like – a tool that, for $2.99, will comb through all of your public tweets of old and flag the ones that are likely to cause trouble for you professionally. The algorithm looks for things like: profanity, racial slurs, nudity, etc. and it highlights them for your review. Of course, you can look at each of them and decide individually whether or not those are tweets that you think you should get rid of, prior to deleting them.
The second tool, Brand Yourself, goes a little farther. For $9.99, Brand Yourself does a complete sweep of the internet and gives you a score. It will scan through any social media accounts that you have, including the standards of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, etc. and flag any strange or unbecoming posts. This includes posts that (may) contain profanity, sexual references, and anything else that may be deemed “offensive” to others (think: political opinions, etc.). Those can be reviewed by you so that you can determine whether or not you would like to keep them or delete them.
Additionally, Brand Yourself will offer up advice/steps that you can take to make your online presence more positive, including optimizing search results, etc. so that you appear higher when being “Googled” or otherwise researched.
Both of these tools are important, because they work in accordance with applicant tracking systems – you know, the dreaded “resume robots” we are all accustomed to dodging during online applications. What you may not know is that the ATS not only scans and scores the documents that you submit online as part of your application, but they may also scan the internet in search of mentions of you, and include the content they find in your overall score. Because of this, it is critically important that you are cognizant of the things that you have posted in the past, as well as things that you will post in the future. Always think before you post, and if you’re ever in doubt, these tools can definitely lend you a helping hand!