Google yourself for fun and profit

QS made some interesting points about online presence, linking to /. - 'slashdot'.

The /. people have lots of interesting comments including the argument that if they don't like who I am, I don't want to work for them anyway.

The concept of passive anonymity also appeals to me - and should be evident from my lackadaisical blogging alias, which is more of an abbreviation than an alias. :)

It's funny to see the "hi, i'm colleen kluttz and i just smoked the. best. weed. everrrrrrr..." post, though. She's the person who complained about her online presence making her look bad.

You would think she would delete the picture off of myspace and not just the video from youtube.com. Silly lady.

Of course, sometimes having yourself googled is a good thing. After all, various professionals offer good advice online, revealing how useful they can be in a particular field.

From personal experience, though, I screened a couple hundred resumes this month because our HR group is short-staffed. If you have anything 'real' to do at work, going through tons of job applications quickly becomes a big waste of time that you can hardly get done with fast enough.

Ironically enough, after two months of being tied up with 'real' work, I finally had a chance to relax, so I was able to actually devote time to reviewing the resumes, instead of rapidly skimming through them. Despite that, even if I give each resume a minute, that means three hours to do 180 of them.

And that's only if you skip through the letters and resumes quickly. If you're going to start googling them, well, that's just a complete waste of time.

I can only imagine that a company that devotes excessive time to doing that kind of paranoia-inducing background checks is either 1. over-staffed or 2. not getting a lot of applicants. There is a third-possibility, of course, being the idea that only short-listed candidates get the extreme background check. Perhaps it happens; but the original "this is who I am and I'm proud of it" comment would be my response to that.

The pride, and the passive anonymity scheme, to be more exact, though, covers my position on the issue.