06/01/2015

Managing Your Reputation

By Jessica Merritt

Good reputation management is essential at every career stage. Professionals just starting out in high school or college, diving into a job search, growing as an established professional, or even operating a small business need a strong reputation to fuel career growth.

Consider these statistics that illustrate just how important reputation is to career development:

• 94% of recruiters use LinkedIn for social media recruitment and 66% use Facebook; more than half (52%) use Twitter as well
• 93% of recruiters review social profiles before making hiring decisions about candidates. Most are searching LinkedIn for signs of experience, connections, skills, cultural fit, industry posts and portfolio work
• 92% of U.S. companies recruit and screen online
• 43% of hiring managers have dismissed candidates due to information found online
• 82% of colleges prefer Facebook as a recruiting tool
• 85% of hiring managers' hiring decisions are influenced by a positive digital presence

Your Online Reputation Matters
Colleges, employers, clients, even colleagues can and will perform online searches to learn more about any particular individual. And that's why it's essential that professionals at every career stage pay attention to online reputation management. As career recruiting, screening, and networking continues to grow online, a strong reputation will become more important than ever before.

The bottom line: employers, recruiters, colleges, and other interested parties are looking for positive signs of life online -- and an absence of negative content. And while most people would agree that they want to improve their online presence, few actually know the steps to take in order to get there. That's where ReputationManagement.com comes in.

Featured Reputation Management Guides
On ReputationManagement.com, you'll find a wealth of reputation management resources for every career stage. In each guide, you'll learn what professionals can do to remove negative reputation information and replace it with positive results. Plus, there's information on specific items each group should work on, such as highlighting volunteer work for students, or developing an online portfolio for job seekers. The website offers guides for:

• high school students
• college graduates
• job seekers
• professionals
• small business owners, including Realtors and restaurant managers.

These resources offer the ultimate guide to reputation management for each targeted career stage, including statistics, actionable advice, and links to tools and other resources that can be used to improve online reputation -- and ultimately, careers. Need a more general option? There's the Ultimate Guide to Reputation Management, which offers advice that anyone, at any career stage, can use.

Reputation Management 101 Resources
In addition to featured guides for specific career audiences, ReputationManagement.com offers an ongoing Reputation Management 101 series. In this series, readers can learn about basic concepts in reputation management -- and how they can take small steps to get started improving their online reputation. Important topics in this category include:

• monitoring your online reputation
• developing a personal domain
• removing embarrassing photos
• removing negative search results
• cleaning up your online reputation for a job search.

Using ReputationManagement.com Resources
ReputationManagement.com's guides are completely free, do not require registration, and can be used by all career services professionals. They are designed to assist people in managing their online reputation, and we encourage career services professionals to quote them, link to them, and pass the guides along to professionals who can benefit from them. ReputationManagement.com enjoys supporting professionals at every career stage, and we would love to answer questions and hear feedback. Simply contact us at jessica@reputationmanagement.com.

Jessica Merritt is a reputation management expert and independent career cheerleader. She has been an online content professional and small business owner since 2007, and editor of ReputationManagement.com since 2013. Jessica can be reached at jessica@reputationmanagement.com.