Samantha Grossman wasn't always thrilled with the impression that emerged when people Googled her name.
"It
wasn't anything too horrible," she said. "I just have a common name.
There would be pictures, college partying pictures, that weren't of me,
things I wouldn't want associated with me."
So before she
graduated from Syracuse University last spring, the school provided her
with a tool that allowed her to put her best Web foot forward. Now when
people Google her, they go straight to a positive image - professional
photo, cum laude degree and credentials - that she credits with helping
her land a digital advertising job in New York.
"I wanted to make sure people would find the actual me and not these other people," she said.
Syracuse,
Rochester and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore are among the universities
that offer such online tools to their students free of charge, realizing
ill-considered Web profiles of drunken frat parties, prank videos and
worse can doom graduates to a lifetime of unemployment - even if the
pages are somebody else's with the same name.
It's a growing trend
based on studies showing that most employers Google prospective hires
and nearly all of them won't bother to go past the first page of
results. The online tools don't eliminate the embarrassing material;
they just put the graduate's most flattering, professional profile front
and center.
"These students have been comfortable with the
intimate details of their lives on display since birth," said Lisa
Severy, president-elect of the National Career Development Association
and director of career services at the University of Colorado-Boulder,
which does not offer the service.
"The first item on our 'five
things to do before you graduate' list is 'clean up your online
profile,'" she said. "We call it the grandma test - if you don't want
her to see it, you probably don't want an employer to, either."
After
initially supplying BrandYourself accounts to graduating seniors,
Syracuse University this year struck a deal with the company - begun by a
trio of alumni - to offer accounts to all of its undergraduate and
graduate students and alumni at no additional charge. About 25,000
people have access to it so far.
"It's becoming more and more
important for students to be aware of and able to manage their online
presence, to be able to have strong, positive things come up on the
Internet when someone seeks them out," said Mike Cahill, Syracuse's
career services director.
Online reputation repair companies have
been around for at least a couple of years, often charging hundreds or
thousands of dollars a year to arrange for good results on search engine
result pages. BrandYourself, which normally charges $10 a month for an
account, launched two years ago as a less expensive, do-it-yourself
alternative after co-founder Pete Kistler ran into a problem with his
own name.
"He couldn't get an internship because he was getting
mistaken for a drug dealer with the same name," said co-founder Patrick
Ambron. "He couldn't even get calls back and found out that was the
problem."
An April survey of 2,000 hiring managers from
CareerBuilder found nearly two in five companies use social networking
sites to research job candidates, and 11 percent said they planned to
start. A third of the hiring managers who said they research candidates
reported finding something like a provocative photo or evidence of
drinking or drug use that cost the candidate a job.
"We want our
students and alumni actively involved in shaping their online presence,"
said Johns Hopkins Career Center Director Mark Presnell. Students are
encouraged to promote positive, professional content that's easily found
by employers, he said.
BrandYourself works by analyzing search
terms in a user's online profile to determine, for example, that a
LinkedIn account might rank 25th on Google searches of the user's name.
The program then suggests ways to boost that ranking. The software also
provides alerts when an unidentified result appears on a user's first
page or if any links rise or fall significantly in rank.
Nati
Katz, a public relations strategist, views his presence online as a kind
of virtual storefront that he began carefully tending while in graduate
school at Syracuse.
Google his name and up pops his LinkedIn page
with a listing of the jobs he's held in digital media and the "500+
connections" badge of honor. His Facebook account is adorned with Katz
smiling over an elegant Thanksgiving dinner table. There are a couple of
professional profiles and his Tumblr link, one after another on the
first page of results and all highlighting his professional experience.
Before
his 2011 graduation, he took the university up on its offer of the
BrandYourself account and said it gave him a leg up with potential
employers and internship supervisors.
"Fortunately, I didn't have
to deal with anything negative under my profile," said Katz, who used
the reputation website BrandYourself.com while pursuing dual degrees in
public relations and international affairs. "What I was trying to form
was really a nice, clean, neat page, very professional."