Job-hunting in the age of Monster: Protecting your online reputation

Maybe it wasn't the MySpace photo that cost an applicant the chance for a second interview with his dream employer, but something on that page turned off the corporate hiring manager who had been impressed during an hour-long interview. Sites like MySpace have changed the dynamic for job-hunters and recruiters alike, according to Neal Bruce, vice president of alliances at Monster (formerly Monster.com). Bruce, a featured speaker at the Center for Service Leadership's 17th annual "Compete Through Service: The Moment of Truth" symposium, talked about the emergence of "digital identities," and how companies are using this new source of information.

Maybe it wasn't the MySpace photo of Matt gleefully showing off a temporary swastika tattoo that cost him a second interview with his dream employer. It could have been the adjacent headline — "nothin' like Hawaiian hash!" — or the Eminem song set at blast level, or even the fact that he playfully checked the box for "shoplifted in the last 12 months" when filling out his online profile.

But something on the page, filled out 18 months earlier while three buddies yelled out suggestions, turned off the corporate hiring manager he'd just wowed in an hour-long interview. Forget the resume, carefully crafted with contiguous dates and ever-widening job responsibilities. Recruiters, placement agencies and employers increasingly rely on candidates' "digital identities" for clues to potential on-the-job performance, according to Neal Bruce, vice president of alliances at Monster (formerly Monster.com), the world's largest online job-search site.

Bruce was a featured speaker at the Center for Service Leadership's 17th annual "Compete Through Service: The Moment of Truth" symposium. Companies used to rely on job references, personality tests and basic background checks to flesh out the bare bones offered in a typical resume.

But now, thanks to Internet sites such as Facebook and LiveJournal, Yahoo Groups, cyber dating services, blogs and the omniscient Google, tons of free and highly personal information is available to would-be employers, all of it cheerfully volunteered. The old job search may have been a choreographed production designed to present the hopeful in the best possible light. But the Internet has changed the rules.

The new digital employment market

"It's become a way to represent oneself to an employer, although most people don't realize that yet. It's another way to look at people. Soon, it will be YouTube, too," Bruce continues. "Photos, video, text, all part of the portfolio." Monster clients' growing use of digital identity in hiring decisions is outstripping the general population growth rate, he adds, "so pretty soon the whole game will change from 'who you know' to 'whom you can trust.'"

This employment shift will inevitably necessitate greater government involvement in digital identity protection, Bruce said. They'll be chasing the crooks that already are coming up with ingenious ways to profit from the personal information so generously offered online. "Somebody's going to slurp all the data off of Facebook and package it and resell it to businesses in different forms," he predicts. Here's another scenario.

Applying for work online is becoming the rule rather than the exception nowadays. Imagine that you, the job seeker, go online to apply for a marketing job with Coca-Cola. But the application page you've accessed — and filled out with your Social Security number, birth date, address, driver's license number and more — is a fraudulent Web site designed specifically to ambush victims for the few hours to a day it usually takes such sites to get discovered and shut down.

That's partly why Monster has developed a "unified application experience" that allows the job seeker to type in his or her information just once, then directs Monster's system to populate partnering employer's application pages with the information. That means one user I.D./password combination rather than several and a lot less time spent to get your name in front of multiple employers. Transferring shared information offers data-mining opportunities, too, Bruce said.

For instance, an employer could correlate hiring venues and employee quality, then focus recruitment resources accordingly. If it turns out that Monster applicants transferred into Company A's application system are high-performers a year after hiring, Company A might cut back on college campus recruitment and boost its Monster alliance. So far Monster hosts career "power recruiting" sites for employers including Coke, McDonalds, IBM and Staples.

To keep on top of emerging trends, Monster pushes "customer intimacy," encouraging customer-service and sales reps to pass on comments, complaints and requests from job seekers and employers via an internal database; the employee flags especially urgent comments for immediate attention. Monster also hosts customer-service events and annual summits that include informal info-gathering, which enmeshes customer-intimacy goals deeper into the company's operational strategy.

Portable careers

A trend that's increasingly obvious is the growth of the shorter-term workforce. Especially among 20-something workers, it's common to switch employers every two or three years, Bruce said. Staying with a company just a year no longer means you're a job hopper; in fact, it hints of a red-hot career with opportunities around every corner. But now that the incoming workforce is less permanent, some employers are backing away from company-paid, in-house training and development programs.

"Why bother spending 18 months developing a kid who will stay with me another year? It no longer makes sense," he explained. Instead, workers will become their own career managers — self-managers, as Bruce said. He likens the change to the pension-to-401k transition that's taken place in the last 15 years or so, as mid-career layoffs became common and employers dropped their pension plans.

Retirement planning used to mean getting a good job and keeping it for 30 years, then collecting a pension and Social Security for another 20 or 25 years. Now, employees who once would have relied on their employers to provide for them open Charles Schwab accounts and attend Suze Orman financial-planning seminars. To facilitate career self-management, Bruce forecasts that "a portable careers industry will spring up, with players in three industries: colleges and universities, classic training companies like The Learning Tree and job boards like Monster."

Offering everything from resume advice and comprehensive training to target job-searching and salary negotiation techniques, these portable career vendors will flourish, he predicts. "What has happened with pensions will happen again, and lead to an even greater drop in employee loyalty," he notes.

"The ties that used to bind employees to companies continue to weaken."

— Neal Bruce, vice president of alliances at Monster

While off-shore outsourcing will continue, wages in India and China are gradually increasing, which means it's harder to hire a foreign computer programmer for 10 cents on the dollar, Bruce said. As a result, "in-sourcing is the next big thing, but I don't know if the workers are going to be found in Kentucky or Alabama or somewhere else."

Still, he noted that since outsourcing is about the availability of desired skill sets as much as it is about hourly wages, high-tech outsourcing will skew towards countries that graduate more science, math and computer-degreed students than the U.S. Expect to see continuing expansion in the temporary workforce, too, as more companies shift employer-compliance obligations and employment risk to third parties.

If Company B doesn't do the payroll, it's not the employer of record, "which frees up the company and makes it easier to beef up or trim the workforce," he said. While some corporations simply rely more and more on "rental" employees from temporary employment agencies, others are outsourcing their entire human-resource operation to a third party such as Hewitt Associates.

Based in Lincolnshire, Illinois, the HR outsourcing and consulting firm grew revenues 28 percent in 2005, to $2.8 billion. But whether you sign up with an employment agency, log on to Monster or job-hunt the traditional way, through the classified ads, it's probably a good idea to sanitize your MySpace page first.

Monster's resume:

• Monster, a subsidiary of New York-based Monster Worldwide, is the world's largest online job-search site.
• Monster currently lists more than 800,000 job advertisements in the U.S.
• Employers can scan more than 34 million resumes through Monster, which operates in 20 other countries.