Googling your name now has a legitimate purpose

Ah, the vanity search, that staple of the slow work day. Like most folks who sit in front of a computer all day, I've happily watched various web links ebb and flow on the Google results page for my name over the years. If a recent study is to be believed, however, I might not be the only one who's paying attention to the search results. A 2006 survey by executive search firm ExecuNet in Norwalk, CN found that 77 percent of recruiters use search engines to research job candidates. A similar CareerBuilder.com survey found that one in four hiring managers does the same. Okay, so make sure to delete all compromising photos of myself from Facebook, right? Well, that's only part of it. What if you don't have a "web presence," so to speak? "Particularly because we're a core technology provider, if someone came looking for a senior-level job and had left no mark on the Internet, I'd see that as a big negative," said Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems. What to do if your Google resume doesn't quite match up to your real resume? ComputerWorld has a quick list of things to do, to make sure that you get noticed by the search engines.

For more on making your mark on the web:
- see this ComputerWorld article