I was getting ready for work on Wednesday when a story came across National Public Radio (NPR) that I must confess got my dander up. It seems cleaning up the online image of the every-day person is getting to be quite the business. The demand is created by corporate human resource types that have gotten wise to the fact you can find out a lot about a person online. I know about that. I’m a reporter – grin! Google and I are great friends!
Careerbuilder.com evidently recently did a survey of 1,000 hiring managers and found that 1 out of 4 regularly google job applicants to dig up the personal dirt. One out of 10 has actually not hired a job candidate because of something they found online. Geesh, imagine what some HR flunky would find if they googled me? Well, I’ll tell you. This blog is the third entry that comes up if you google my name. The first two are some other Heather Kirkwood who is an attorney. My bio on www.expoweb.com, (my professional persona) doesn’t show up until around entry seven or eight.
Wouldn’t it bite to be the lawyer Heather and get confused for the HPS Heather? I wonder how often a job applicant gets the don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you treatment because of someone else’s life circumstances or transgressions?
The truth is I thought about using my real name here long before CareerBuilder.com brought it to my attention that such a decision might be a bad idea. From the very beginning of this blog I made a very purposeful decision to use my real name. It’s a decision I spent about a month thinking about before I ever wrote my first blog entry.
I did it because as a journalist I know the power of a real story. When you quote someone, for example, who is willing to stand behind what they say with their real identity it carries much more credibility and weight than some “source who spoke on condition of anonymity.”
Of course there are times you can’t tell the real story without using such sources, but I think reporters in general are way to willing to offer such protection to sources who might have good motivation to not use their name. They just might not always be telling the truth.
If I was going to tell my story of Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome than I wanted to do it in a completely honest way. I wanted to be able to draw upon this blog for antidotes when doing outreach or giving speeches. I didn’t want to put anything down here I wasn’t willing to share with the entire planet because someday I’d like to write a book (although not sure what form that would take.)
The truth is I can’t afford to not stand up and tell my story. You don’t inspire researchers and you don’t motivate fundraisers by remaining quiet. I need a cure and I need it now. I need a cure so I have a career to worry about. I need a cure because my brother and I share this syndrome and I can’t bare the thought of one of us one day watching the other get sick and pass away. I need a cure because frankly the streets of heaven are way too crowded with HPS angels who left their families behind decades too early. When you have an ultra-rare disease, you can’t leave it up to someone else to tell the story – there just aren’t many people to help. My only regret is that I can’t afford billboard space to advertise this url. Someone has to know about Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome. Someone has to hear our story. I’d shout it from the mountain tops if it would help.
Evidently there are several new start-up companies willing to help you “scrub” your online identity. They’ll do a search, find the objectionable material online about you (like the picture you didn’t know anyone took of you at that kegger in college) and get it taken down. Two companies that were quoted in the story were www.ReputationDefender.com and another one I think was called Namyz.
Generally employers, according to the CareerBuilder.com survey, were turned off by things such as blogging about lying to your boss or confessing to illegal behavior on some message board. (I can see why they’d be less than impressed.) But, I wonder what happens if, for example, you belong to a MySpace group related to some health condition or disability and they discover that? The other issue, of course, is one’s online persona may have very little to do with one’s professional persona. Is it fair to be judged based on something you wrote in a chatroom on your own time possibly years ago? Talk about big brother!
As for me, well, I couldn’t hide my HPS very long anyway. If it’s going to be that big a problem, than the job probably isn’t a good fit for me anyway. It’s sort of like when I was job hunting after graduating from college.
Frankly, that was one of the worst years of my life, and I’ve been through a lot. I did numerous interviews where I was asked questions like, “If you work in our newsroom, will you need assistance going to the bathroom?” or then there’s the writing test I took one time where the essay question (to prove you could write in a how-to format) asked us to write instructions about how to drive a car. (I’d never driven before, not even in a parking lot. I’ve since remedied that problem – grin!) Oh, the many, many stories I could tell! But, the job I actually landed didn’t ask me a thing about my disability. I even brought it up and they seemed uninterested. For them, it was a non-issue. The employer, by the way, is my current employer. I left after a year because they couldn’t pay me enough, but I came back. In the end that’s who you want to work for – the person who is so undertaken by your disability that it’s a non-issue.
The trouble is most employers don’t appreciate the skill sets those of us with disabilities or chronic health issues bring to the table that are a benefit. We’re resilient. We’re resourceful. We know how to problem solve. We know the difference between a big problem and a non-problem. We’re survivors.
Careerbuilder.com evidently recently did a survey of 1,000 hiring managers and found that 1 out of 4 regularly google job applicants to dig up the personal dirt. One out of 10 has actually not hired a job candidate because of something they found online. Geesh, imagine what some HR flunky would find if they googled me? Well, I’ll tell you. This blog is the third entry that comes up if you google my name. The first two are some other Heather Kirkwood who is an attorney. My bio on www.expoweb.com, (my professional persona) doesn’t show up until around entry seven or eight.
Wouldn’t it bite to be the lawyer Heather and get confused for the HPS Heather? I wonder how often a job applicant gets the don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you treatment because of someone else’s life circumstances or transgressions?
The truth is I thought about using my real name here long before CareerBuilder.com brought it to my attention that such a decision might be a bad idea. From the very beginning of this blog I made a very purposeful decision to use my real name. It’s a decision I spent about a month thinking about before I ever wrote my first blog entry.
I did it because as a journalist I know the power of a real story. When you quote someone, for example, who is willing to stand behind what they say with their real identity it carries much more credibility and weight than some “source who spoke on condition of anonymity.”
Of course there are times you can’t tell the real story without using such sources, but I think reporters in general are way to willing to offer such protection to sources who might have good motivation to not use their name. They just might not always be telling the truth.
If I was going to tell my story of Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome than I wanted to do it in a completely honest way. I wanted to be able to draw upon this blog for antidotes when doing outreach or giving speeches. I didn’t want to put anything down here I wasn’t willing to share with the entire planet because someday I’d like to write a book (although not sure what form that would take.)
The truth is I can’t afford to not stand up and tell my story. You don’t inspire researchers and you don’t motivate fundraisers by remaining quiet. I need a cure and I need it now. I need a cure so I have a career to worry about. I need a cure because my brother and I share this syndrome and I can’t bare the thought of one of us one day watching the other get sick and pass away. I need a cure because frankly the streets of heaven are way too crowded with HPS angels who left their families behind decades too early. When you have an ultra-rare disease, you can’t leave it up to someone else to tell the story – there just aren’t many people to help. My only regret is that I can’t afford billboard space to advertise this url. Someone has to know about Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome. Someone has to hear our story. I’d shout it from the mountain tops if it would help.
Evidently there are several new start-up companies willing to help you “scrub” your online identity. They’ll do a search, find the objectionable material online about you (like the picture you didn’t know anyone took of you at that kegger in college) and get it taken down. Two companies that were quoted in the story were www.ReputationDefender.com and another one I think was called Namyz.
Generally employers, according to the CareerBuilder.com survey, were turned off by things such as blogging about lying to your boss or confessing to illegal behavior on some message board. (I can see why they’d be less than impressed.) But, I wonder what happens if, for example, you belong to a MySpace group related to some health condition or disability and they discover that? The other issue, of course, is one’s online persona may have very little to do with one’s professional persona. Is it fair to be judged based on something you wrote in a chatroom on your own time possibly years ago? Talk about big brother!
As for me, well, I couldn’t hide my HPS very long anyway. If it’s going to be that big a problem, than the job probably isn’t a good fit for me anyway. It’s sort of like when I was job hunting after graduating from college.
Frankly, that was one of the worst years of my life, and I’ve been through a lot. I did numerous interviews where I was asked questions like, “If you work in our newsroom, will you need assistance going to the bathroom?” or then there’s the writing test I took one time where the essay question (to prove you could write in a how-to format) asked us to write instructions about how to drive a car. (I’d never driven before, not even in a parking lot. I’ve since remedied that problem – grin!) Oh, the many, many stories I could tell! But, the job I actually landed didn’t ask me a thing about my disability. I even brought it up and they seemed uninterested. For them, it was a non-issue. The employer, by the way, is my current employer. I left after a year because they couldn’t pay me enough, but I came back. In the end that’s who you want to work for – the person who is so undertaken by your disability that it’s a non-issue.
The trouble is most employers don’t appreciate the skill sets those of us with disabilities or chronic health issues bring to the table that are a benefit. We’re resilient. We’re resourceful. We know how to problem solve. We know the difference between a big problem and a non-problem. We’re survivors.
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