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Does your online profile help or hinder?

“What do you know about our Company?” A basic, starter question in most interviews. Frankly, most candidates can find the answers online while sitting in your Reception.

Of course you expect them to do their homework on your Company. The good ones won’t just look at your web page. They want to find out what working for you is really like. Research by the job board Monster and YouGov found that 28% of jobseekers were less likely to apply for a role if they formed an unfavourable impression of a company online.

Your decisions and your online profile

The film “Oceans 13” shows perfectly the value of treating everyone with respect. Opening a new hotel, “Willy Bank” (Al Pacino), is desperate to get his 5 Diamonds Award. He treats the man he thinks is the reviewer like a king. He dismisses the real reviewer as insignificant. Needless to say, the hotel review is not what he was expecting.

No matter what situation you are dealing with, treat all your employees with respect. If you don’t, you might not like the review your business gets.

What does your online profile say about your business?

For an extreme example, Google Sports Direct. Their staffing practices have been publicly criticised recently. Allegations range from underpaid wages to one lady giving birth in a toilet as she feared being sacked if she took time off “sick”. If you believe what you read online, why would you want to work there?

Google your business. Check your Facebook and Twitter. Do you see anything online that would put a good candidate off applying for you? Could this be why you aren’t getting good applicants? Can you do something about it?

The Online Future

Checking a candidate’s LinkedIn profile is a sensible move. You can see more about what they have done in their career and there may be recommendations you can review. However, new apps are on the horizon which go further.

Apps are available in the US that comb through online information to produce a candidate profile. They use algorithms to see how many times a candidate has used key words such as “loan” or if go out a lot at weekends. I think that’s a step too far. It’s like something out of George Orwell’s 1984.

For now, find out what your candidates are reading about you. Treat people with respect no matter what this situation. After all, they could be writing your next review.

If you want to learn more about how to successfully recruit new staff, our next “Hiring Right First Time” course is planned for 3rd November 2016.  For more details, click here.