Monitoring your online reputation is important to your job search. Spokeo is yet another place to watch your actual online “personal brand”. Spokeo.com is a site that pulls information from all over the web about you and everyone else.
The information is all already public, but some of it is out of date. The website compiles data from real-estate listings, tax records, insurance data banks, credit data, neighborhood data, Facebook, LinkedIn, the White Pages, and much more. All this is summarized very neatly into a profile about you. Your profile will list your family members, and which ones live with you. How much your house costs and statistics about your neighborhood is included. Personal information about age, education, phone numbers, and the like is displayed. Credit information is behind a tab that requires a paid membership.
Why should job candidates be wary? Things you left off your resume are all assembled neatly in one place for the interviewer to peruse. The interviewer can find this information in multiple locations on the web, but that’s time consuming. Having information about the kind of neighborhood you live in easily accessible, may effect salary negotiations, or may turn off a company all together. You just don’t know. It might work in your favor. The Spokeo service let’s the interviewer get answers to all those illegal questions without you knowing it.
I found no way to correct any of the information; but there is a way to delete your listing. At the bottom of the page you can select privacy settings. It’s a very simple process.
While you are at it, check out your children’s listings and your senior citizen loved ones. Seems this could be a nice easy place for predators to identify their targets. The world of privacy is changing and the battle to be private will be lost. I just finished reading the third book in a trilogy about the vast machine. The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks discusses how the world can become a prison without freedom. Then again, society has had multiple revolutions and adapted quite well. There have been multiple developments that changed the world and society built in safeguards. The Bomb, the pill, video games, and democracy, just to name a few.
Knowing what is being said about you on the internet is an important part of your job search. Be certain to have a Google Alert set to track your online reputation. Most of all, do positive things online to squash out any mis-information.
