Have you ever Googled yourself?

This week, our class learned that 80% of employers Google you before they even invite you for an interview. We learned that in today’s workforce, employers value the transparency when recruiting and hiring candidates, so you need to make sure your online presence is clean and honest. When employers search for you on Google, they don’t do it to intentionally find negative things about you. They simply want to get to know their applicants, so they can better select candidates for an interview. Therefore, you need to take some things into consideration when posting on social media.

Not only do employers want to know your qualifications for the position, but they also want to know how you’d fit in with their culture. Employers Google candidates to assess their personalities and behavior online. They’ll often check to see whether you bad-mouth previous employers or coworkers online and the type of content you share. We discussed in detail about online safety, appropriate content and photos.

Erick had us complete an exercise in class where we checked our online presence to see what came up when we searched for ourselves and scanned our social media. Luckily, all the content we found when we did this was appropriate!

To bring a close to our Employability Readiness and Skills class, we talked about patience and manners. Our class has learned a ton in these past six weeks, and we are looking forward to the new class starting soon!