January 26th, 2011 by admin

Take a look at this chart, taken from ‘Recruiters actually care about your web reputation whether or not you don’t.’ The top 5 reasons discussed here to reject an applicant for recruitment are things that’d be equally inappropriate if done directly in front of that possible employer.

Both of these examples would suggest a shift in the level of transparency with which we are cosy. Some will still be apprehensive about this shift, and so for them, it could be a comfort that these services are opt-in : if you don’t need other users seeing your info, you can either increase your privacy levels or delete your account. But now as everything moves towards the social, it’s not even about your information any more, but it’s about your information re everyone else’s. So an accurate statement than ‘the publics are becoming more public’, is that the publics are getting more contextual.

From the perspective of a job-seeker hoping to keep certain content concealed from a prospective employer or recruiter, this is something to seriously think about. As I scrolled thru Google’s Social Circle and looked thru the Secondary Connections, I was shocked to see who turned up as connections of my connections. You’ve heard about the 6 degrees of separation as an idea but now with tools and visualizations that map our networks it is apparent. And as the tools improve, it will become less complicated for any person to discover about anything that has been put online about or by you. By tapping the network, everyone in the world has access to you within just a few steps.

We are nodes in a network. We have strengths and abilities, but they get wasted if we don’t know how to attach them with and through the right people. There is a movement taking place that’s pushing us towards a model that is more relational and contextual, or as John Hagel places it the Big shift from information stocks to data flows ( break down silos dividing talent and info ), from transactions to relationships ( build up trust to help price exchange ), and from establishments driven by scalable efficiency to institutions driven by scalable peer learning ( heightened competition and commercial pressures will demand a collaborative workforce for success ).

I’m of the opinion a personal accountability should be taken in order to make this occur. It is not going to get orchestrated by somebody at the very top, nor should that be the expectancy. If our organizations or social networks function as complicated adaptive systems, self-organizing bodies comprised of independently working agents, then we’d imagine this to be a method that may develop organically. And I think it will we just need a push.

rather than permitting networks to evolve without direction, successful individuals, groups and organizations have revealed that it pays off to actively manage your network. Using the latest research we are able to now knit networks to create productive individuals and smart communities.

So that the conclusion here is that our online reputation protection should not be restricted to what we do not want folk to see or say about us. Let the knowledge that you’re in public guide your judgment about what to post online . Instead, what if we think about our online reputations as the bridges that function to enhance the network itself?

source: Marshall Honor