All right! Time for your yearly New Year’s Resolutions.
You may be one of the dispossessed, the disavowed, the let-go: in fact, one of the recently techy-hip jobless. Or you may be one of the techy-hip, but you still have a job, just not one that you’re particularly fond of. You’ve been following along here on Javamancy for awhile, and you’ve picked up some useful tips, and you’re wondering about what to do, now that the festivities are over and you need to get serious and get a new job!
You’ve fixed up your resume… all super-A-grade stuff.
You’ve called up all of your buddies and past colleagues and assembled an impressive line-up.
You’ve practiced your snap-lines, your 30-second lines, your 60-second lines, and your responses to common interview questions.
But there’s something you keep thinking is a bit… odd. Something that you may have missed. Something that may actually prevent you from getting that plum job you’ve been seeking. What is it?
Your Online Social Networking
“It’s not what you know… it’s whom you know.”
I’m sure you’ve heard that line before. Sometimes there’s that guilt-by-association aspect that can penalize you, when recruiters google you and see that you have some “colorful” friends in your network.
If you have accounts/pages/sites on various online social networks, you should review them carefully and prune out the less-than-professional (and NSFW) content. It may sound strange that you’re attempting to remove personal and potentially incriminating information about yourself from a supposed casual social network that you frequent, but there tends to be a lack of contextual filtering on search engines, so all sorts of things may “pop up” when recruiters and employers visit your site.
Depending on the social networks you frequent, removing offensive material may be easy or not-so-easy.
Uh-Oh… You Did It Again
Blogging and other online writing expressions are generally publicly available. That was the original intent behind the software, and the sub-cultures that have grown around them. But like in the physical world, things that you write or say may sometimes be misconstrued, and sometimes it may be difficult to explain/justify/negate them.
Be prepared. The best course of action is, of course, consider your words as if you are in public. But unlike in the physical world, where your interactions with others include not just your verbal cues, but also non-verbal ones that provide important context to your discussions, you cannot use merely conversational language (especially in English!) and expect that your readers will always be on the same wavelength as you– or that your readers are your intended audience.
There are probably several texts out there that can guide you through various writing techniques, but it is generally a good policy to be as clear as possible when writing about various subjects… unless your intent is to offer ambiguity as part of the discussion. As someone who has received plenty of E-mails, phone calls, IM’s, and even comments about my posts, I know all too well about how different people often have opposing opinions about seemingly innocuous or factual items.
And let’s not forget the multimedia aspect of the Internet: having NSFW materials floating around of yourself (alone or with other people) is NOT a good thing. Get rid of it.
Finding Yourself All Over (Again)
Once you’ve tackled your online social networks and your online presence sites and apps, you still have to check the various search engines.
Google [GOOG] is often the first one to come to mind, both because of its ubiquity and its caching mechanism. Alas, there is no convenient solution to getting Google to delete the cached copies of your scandalous photos or drunken escapade videos, other than contacting it and begging for it to be removed.
You should search for yourself and see if outdated information about yourself surfaces: supposedly dead sites you owned, old resumes and CV’s, written critiques and criticisms of your past work, etc. Be prepared to deal with these.
Happy Hunting
Some of you will probably have a lot of work ahead of you. Some of you may not. And I suspect not a few of you will discover some interesting info about yourself floating around the Internet.
Let’s kick off the new year with some massive (spring) cleaning. 
And good luck on the new job, folks.
