Transcript from the "Google Yourself" Lesson
[00:00:00]
>> Paul DeBettignies: The second thing I'm gonna do and some of you will probably do it now while I'm speaking and that's just fine, I'm going to go Google me so I know that 85% of recruiters and HR professionals will admit that when we see job seekers or candidates online that we're going to go find out more info about them, the other 15% are lying.
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They just don't wanna get sued. But all the survey say, recruiters, HR managers, and I do it every day, just so you know, if a candidate applies for a role, I am really saying, okay, like what's the LinkedIn profile, they also want to it or wonder what they've been tweeting about.
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And for me, I'm always trying to include people into the job search. Some people gonna try to exclude you from the job search. So tomorrow you will find on Twitter that I will have been at a tailgate for the Gopher football versus Purdue game. It's gonna be a little chilly tomorrow.
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Undoubtedly, there is going to be a photo of me and some something could be fireball [LAUGH], could be some rumble mins and hot chocolate like something. Undoubtedly, we're gonna a photo like me with a beer in my hand. That's cool. I wanna make sure though that if I'm now going out and doing a job search networking with tech professionals reaching out to a CTO, that they don't see the photo from college, that other photo.
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That one when you were like after the game, after the party. It's now 3 o'clock in the morning, walking back from Taco Bell. I wanna make sure that they're not gonna see those photos. So I'm gonna Google myself. I'm gonna log out of Google. I'm gonna make it so that it's not doing my search preferences.
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Log out, I'm gonna do an Incognito Window. Like I wanna pretend I'm the HR director at 3M, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, wherever it might be. What are they gonna find out about me? So I need to find out, I learn from that. Do I need to take anything off of my online identity?
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For my friends and I, we have rule, two beer rule. It's football. We're gonna have a couple of beers before the game. Three or more beers, we put the phones away, so that should really be going forward, sort of your rule if you don't already have one. It's called a show that you have personality.
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It's called a show that you have outside interest beyond tech. But we don't need to show them all the things you're doing outside of the world of tech. So some of the things you have posted on Facebook that I can find, you wanna lock that down if you can for a while.
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I know there are sites that will freak you out is if you go to pipo.com, P-I-P-O.com, type in your name and your like and it could be Alabama, Minnesota, Pennsylvania. Undoubtedly, you're going to find things about you that you forgot about. So if I go to pipo.com, search my name, I find my address from when I was six years old.
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Now a couple of you just cringed. I know a couple you're like, shit, see, a couple of your smiling now too like, okay, now let's really figure out what it is that someone might find. I wanna know all of that info before someone else is going to so I would do that this weekend early part of next week.
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Some of you are doing it right now, [LAUGH] that's quite okay with me, cuz I wanna figure out if I can find me. Can I find my LinkedIn profile, can I find my Twitter account? And I mean this in a good way now. A couple of you are smiling now by the way looking at your keyboard, you're like how do they know?
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Welcome to the Internet. But I wanna be able to figure out people are gonna be able to find me because you're a couple statistics for 35% of employers are less likely to interview a candidate they can't find online. So 10 years ago, is roughly 10 years ago, 11 years ago when Facebook made it so that anyone, it wasn't just college university, let's call it 10 years ago.
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Back then it was weird if a recruiter or a HR, personal hiring manager would look for you online. Now if I can't find you online, I get freaked out. If I can't find some high school photo of you with a French horn, from a junior in high school, if I can't find that photo of you being outside on skateboard roller blades, whoever it was when you were ten, that's weird to me now.
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It truly is. And so what we're gonna talk a little bit about, like how to have an online presence, but I just kinda wanna give you some sense of this is the reaction. So I wanna make sure I can be found and there are more stats about this.
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So it cuts both ways. If I can find things out about you online, I am more likely to speak with you and of course the cuts the other way too is I might not. There are lots of positive reasons to be having an online website. We're gonna talk about that, to have a presence online, to have a LinkedIn profile, to be on Instagram or Twitter if you want to be.
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There's lots of reasons to do it. We're gonna focus on those.