Forums

If you are one of those posters that signs your real name to your blog/forum/wiki/whatever posts and you are interviewing, do yourself a favor. Don't post about your current interviews, salary negotiations, impressions of the clown that is interviewing you or how you have two offers and are thinking of playing them against one another....LOL :shock:

I have been using Google alerts a bunch lately and it has really surprised me as to what I find out about candidates. :oops: I think that M&M covered the common sense of this in the MySpace cast.

Guess what folks, Manager Tools is on the Internet too! :wink:

And you wonder why I am AManagerTool....

HMac's picture

I think they covered it under the general heading of "Common Sense" (or, as others might put it: [i]"Don't Be A Dope"[/i])...

There was a really important undercurrent to the MySpace casts - about not kidding yourself that anything on the web is private - and therefore behaving on the web with the same care you behave anywhere you might be observed by coworkers, current and future bosses, industry influencials, etc.

-Hugh

kklogic's picture

Even if you've been careful about using your real name, you need to think about if you've used a screen name that is a part of your email address. For instance, if Tool's email address that he uses on his resume were [email protected] --- that's equally traceable. Food for thought - make a new freemail account for your resumes.

stephenbooth_uk's picture

I'd add, remember that many mailing lists now have web archives. Even those mails you thought were just going to a few people or a few hundred people on the list are now visible to and searchable by everyone on the internet.

On the subject of Google Alerts, I really do recommend that everyone use them. As a minimum I think you should have alerts set up on your own name (and any pseudonyms you commonly use on the internet) and your employers company name. Personally I have them set up for:

* My real name
* The 2 pseudonyms I commonly use on the internet
* My main email address
* My employer's name
* The name of the company I work for (not actually my employer, it's complex)
* The names of most of the senior managers at the company I work for (CEO, board and managers I have to deal with)
* Ditto for my employer
* Mark and Mike
* Names (real and pseudo) of some of my friends who are likely to write thing on the net or be written about.

I get between 3 and 10 emails a day, typically around 5 to 6, from this.

Stephen

AManagerTool's picture

Years ago, I remember asking a few questions on MS discussion forums. I get alerts that tell me of new versions of my same questions and their answers being posted on other boards. People use screen scrapers to pull useful content to their sites. They have no problem swiping posts off of MSDN forums etc for their own use.

You think you deleted the rant on Microsoft's forum but now it's on at least 15 other boards as well. EEEEEEEHHHHH!!!! :roll: