Online Identity and Reputation

For most of us, job security and the possibility of spending our entire career at the same company are things of the past. Now we have to manage our careers in a different way. To sell their goods and services, most companies have a marketing department that handles everything from brand strategies and packaging to prices, slogans and advertising. Individuals, meanwhile, sell their skills on the job market through résumés and professional references. However, this is no longer enough.

The goal of this article is to help you shape the way you market yourself to advance your professional career. It’s about thinking like a marketing specialist to build your Personal Brand. The concept of “Personal Branding,” devised primarily by Peter Montoya and William Arruda, has been well developed in the United States for the past 10 years.

I. What is Personal Branding?

Whether you’re an employee, consultant or entrepreneur, you have a public image as important as that of any business. Personal Branding enables you to create and promote that image. It also helps you manage your career and think smarter about the strategies you want to employ to achieve your goals. Until today, only an elite group of executives and consultants with the means to pay for a personal coach or costly training courses has benefited from Personal Branding. However, new online services now enable anyone to develop a Personal Brand, and much more. With the Internet, Personal Branding is no longer limited to executives; it is possible for everyone. In the past, you had to be in the news to become known, but with the Internet, no one is unknown. It doesn’t matter if you unplug your computer and cancel your Internet service, because all it takes is for your neighbor, colleague or friend to publish information or an opinion about you and people will know about you. The Internet offers a global public forum for building your Personal Brand. Welcome to the wonderful world of user-generated content! Don’t worry, the information published by your friends will probably be positive. However, there is both “positive” information that reflects who you truly are, and that which does not.

You have values, personal qualities and talents. It is important to know how to effectively convey them to people who will have an impact on your personal and professional development. How can you get recruiters, employers, buyers and decision-makers who are deluged with applications and proposals to see what sets you apart?

Your professional and social references (managers, colleagues, clients, partners, friends,…) are the most important marketing tool at your disposal. What they say about you and your work is what people will remember. Your Reference Network is thus one of the most important keys to your “Personal Brand.”

Here are Peter Montoya’s Eight Laws of “Personal Branding” (see references at end of document):

1. An effective Personal Brand must be specific. You should express who you are in terms of a single concept: a strength, talent or personal achievement. What, at its core, is your business? A person who claims to know how to do everything…knows how to do nothing. In other words, a Jack of all trades is master of none – “It is better to excel in any single art than to arrive only at mediocrity in several.” -Pliny the Younger.

2. Your Personal Brand cannot merely be known; it must be recognized by your peers and associates (your professional and social references). This is the reputation aspect of your Personal Brand.

3. Your Personal Brand must be true to life, authentic. It must present you in a positive light, not make you out to be perfect.

4. If you don’t differentiate yourself, you’ll be just like everyone else and you won’t stand out from the crowd. You need to distinguish yourself from others.

5. You must be more visible than everyone else. The wider your circle of influence, the more credible you become (social networks, networking, etc.).

6. There must be no discrepancy between what you say and what you do, either in public or in private. Do what you say and say what you do (principle of congruence).

7. A Personal Brand takes time to establish itself. You have to be patient.

8. Your brand will achieve better results if associated with a value or an idea that is universally recognized as positive and compelling.

Having a Personal Brand is not a choice. Everyone has one, be it positive, neutral or negative. Thanks to the Internet-or no thanks, depending on your point of view-sooner or later your Personal Brand will become publicly known and accessible everywhere in the world. If you fail to define your Personal Brand others will do so for you, and you may find their version to be distorted.

Personal Branding can be summed up as follows: know yourself better (conduct a full self-evaluation or ask for an evaluation from those around you – 360° feedback) in order to make yourself better known (using methods and tools such as directories, social networks, and networking). We will now look at these two concepts in closer detail.

II. How to get to know yourself better

Know yourself better in order to make yourself better known! Unfortunately, the suggestions offered here are no substitute for working with a professional coach or a friend with an aptitude for coaching. Taking a step back and seeing yourself objectively all on your own is actually quite difficult. Coaching helps people through this process of self-reflection. A coach asks you questions and helps you find your own answers, but doesn’t give advice (you haven’t hired a consultant). If, however, you have neither the time nor the money to hire a coach to assist you, the following tips might help.

As your own coach, you might ask yourself the following questions in an effort to be as objective as possible.

1. Who am I?

To devise a game plan, you must first define your mission, your vision for the future and your objectives.

What are my strengths? My values? My passions? My goals? What is my personality? What do I have to offer?

To help you answer these questions, you can use feedback from your annual performance reviews by your manager. Given how difficult it is to evaluate yourself objectively, you can also solicit the help of friends and colleagues. Decide what questions you would like them to answer, then invite them to do so either in an honest but friendly face-to-face talk or by email. If you send out an email questionnaire, it’s a good idea to call first—both to ask if this is okay and to encourage follow-through.

2. Who are my competitors? What advantages do I have to offer?

What audience do I hope to reach? Who are my peers? My competitors? Who needs to know about me if I want to achieve my goals?

You need to analyze your environment, determine what differentiates you from others, and define your added value. Ask yourself, “What makes me unique? How will I articulate this uniqueness?”

Compare how you perceive yourself with how your colleagues perceive you. This important step can help you come up with an action plan to improve your technical and behavioral skills and/or a communication plan that showcases your as-yet unrecognized strengths.

Your Personal Brand, like any other brand, is defined by the perceptions of others. Your goal should be to gather feedback about yourself from your network of friends and colleagues so you can create the most accurate self-portrait possible.

III. How to make yourself better known

Search engines are used millions of times a day to look up individuals online. People search for information about their colleagues, new clients, friends and others. 47% of American adults (compared to 22% in 2002) have already checked the Internet to see what is said about them; of these, 53% also admit to looking up their co-workers, neighbors or potential spouse (Source: survey of PEW Internet & American Life Project).

It will soon be possible to assert that if Google doesn’t know you, you don’t exist! Your future success depends on establishing your online identity and reputation. Recruiters are going to be increasingly proactive, looking you up on Google and business-oriented social networking sites. You’ll want them to find positive information that is in line with your goals. So you should have your profile online and get it indexed on search engines.

Type your first and last name into Google and see what you get. The information about you may be false, outdated, embarrassing, incomplete, or it might pertain to another person with the same first and last name.

The next step is to evaluate your current online presence and to determine the best strategy for managing it.

A. What is your online reputation? Do you have an online identity?

The simplest place to start is to analyze search-engine results. Type your first and last name into Google and Yahoo (and potentially MSN Search) with quotation marks: “John Smith”.

You can expand your search by looking up your nickname, maiden name or abbreviations of your first name (Jonathon, John or J.). For more details, check out Claimid.

Next, take a closer look at the results. Does the content (pictures and text) that you find on the Internet match the image you want to project? Does it match your Personal Brand?

B. Creating and promoting your online profile: self-referencing, sponsored links or domain names?

Once you know what is being said about you online, it’s time to actively publicize what you do want people to know—in short, to create and promote your online profile.

1. Self-referencing

a. Create one or more profiles on sites that specialize in Personal Brand promotion, such as CV 2.0, LookUpPage, Brand-Yourself.com, QAlias, Ziki, Zoominfo, Ziggs, Naymz, Spock and Wink. Their respective offerings will be covered in an upcoming article.

b. Add a link to your online profile in your letterhead, emails and blogs.

c. If you have something to say, start a blog! Try Blogger, for example. You have to be in it for the long haul, however. If you post content on your blog for three months and then stop, that won’t convey a very positive image of you (lack of perseverance, flaky). A blog can help you, but it can also work against you if your readers don’t like what you publish. Worse yet, if your blog is poorly written, people may think that you can’t express yourself clearly in writing. That said, a blog can bring a lot of value to your Personal Brand—value directly proportional to the value of the content that you publish.

d. You can also use video-sharing sites to publish clips of yourself in professional situations (speeches, presentations, interviews) or simply post a video résumé (who you are, what you are looking for, your experience, your skills). Here is an example of a video-résumé on Youtube.com: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=RAZ37YnYAiU

e. You can also publish your resume as a powerpoint presentation, here’s the résumé of Saranyan, the pioneer in this field: http://www.slideshare.net/saranyan/visual-resume

2. Sponsored Links

Most websites offering online profile or résumé services let you index your profile in search engines (either automatically when you create your profile or upon request). Some offer additional services as well.

QAlias, Naymz, Ziggs, Ziki (soon CV 2.0 & Brand-Yourself) offer subscriptions that take the profile you create on their site and index it as a commercial link in several search engines. Your Ziki or Ziggs profile will thus appear at the top, among the sponsored links (i.e. the commercial links above the web results or in the right-hand column).

However, sponsored links through such services will not redirect users to your blog or Viadeo profile. They link only to your profile on Naymz, Ziki or Ziggs.

In addition, you have to pay for this service since search engines charge for sponsored links. Ziggs and Naymz charge about $60 per year (or $4.95 per month) to put your profile in the sponsored links of search engines. QAlias charges about $120 for almost the same features. Ziki is currently offering this service for 30 euros per year (general public) and 180 euros per year (enterprises).

If you wish to redirect traffic to a particular profile (a blog, professional social networks, your company’s website, etc.), you can do the indexing yourself by opening an account on one of the following sites:

Google AdWords: https://adwords.google.com

With Google AdWords, you only pay when Internet users click on your name in the sponsored links. In addition to listing your first and last name (which are essential to your personal brand), you can also add keywords related to your business, expertise or organization. This could be an interesting advantage over QAlias, Naymz, Ziggs and Ziki, all of which index just your first and last name. However, the more keywords you add, the more expensive your indexing will be!

Your first and last name appear next to or above the search results. There will probably be other web-page hits with your first and last name, though, and no one is required to click on your Google-sponsored link.

Here is an example using the name John Webb. If you look at the right side of the image, you can see the red arrow pointing to the link sponsored by Naymz (click the image to enlarge it):

With Google AdWords, there is no minimum spending requirement (apart from the activation fees). If no one clicks on your name, you pay nothing. You can also set a maximum spending budget, say $5. In this case, your listing will be removed from the sponsored links once your $5 limit is reached. Want a sense of what those $5 will buy you? If the cost per click is $0.01, up to 500 people can click your sponsored link. Depending on how widely you are known, that could be how many people use a search engine to look you up in a single month…or over the span of a year or two! Ziggs and Naymz charge you $4.95 per month, but you receive placement on at least three search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) – Only in Google with Ziki. You have to calculate what makes the best sense for you according to your own notoriety and your needs.Note that the cost per click varies. The keywords “DVD” or “travel” used by businesses will probably have a higher cost per click than your last name. That’s the law of supply and demand. To manage your budget, however, you can specify a maximum cost per click, just as you can cap your total spending.

In USA, Google AdWords currently costs:

- Activation fee: $5.00
- Cost per click (CPC): minimum $0.01, more for popular keywords.

For more information, visit the Learning Center.

Cost per thousand impressions (CPM, from the Latin “Cost Per Mille”), used for placement-targeted ads, is an alternative to CPC. You choose the websites where you would like your ads to appear, and you pay each time your ad is displayed rather than for each click on your ad. Click here for more information.

Yahoo Search Marketing: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com

Yahoo has a system that is similar to Google’s.

Microsoft adCenter: http://advertising.microsoft.com/search-advertising

Overall, Microsoft uses the same principle as Google and Yahoo. Here is an excerpt from its site: “Discover Microsoft adCenter, the online marketing tool that allows you to manage your sponsored-link campaigns on Live Search (MSN’s search engine). For a one-time $5.00 fee to create your account and as little as an additional $0.05 per keyword, you can make your company’s website appear above the list of Live Search results.”

Given that Google is the leading search engine, Google AdWords may be the best choice if you are going to pick only one service.

3. Buying a domain name

Buying a domain name is an effective way to permanently establish your online presence. Domain names now cost next to nothing ($7/year). The price often includes the creation of one or more related email addresses – which you won’t lose when you change Internet service providers. This becomes important especially if that email address appears on the hundreds of résumés you have sent out! Domain names often also come with space where you can publish content such as your résumé or profile. If you know how to use web publishing tools such as Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage, you can design your own web page. Better yet, have your domain name link to the website where your résumé, profile or professional blog is listed.

For example, on the site 1&1 (www.1and1.com) you can, for 7 US dollars/year, get a domain name, an email address and 5 pages of web space (you even get the software to create the pages yourself).  Also check out the offers on Godaddy (www.godaddy.com).

For your name to rank high in search results, your domain name should include your first and last name separated by a hyphen; otherwise, the search engine will think it’s a single word. For example: www.firstname-lastname.com (or .net, .org, .ca, .us, .uk, etc.). Domain name is one of the first indexing criteria used by search engines, and is analyzed before a page’s HTML code, structure or meta tags. By setting up your domain name this way, you increase the chances of your page appearing at the top of search results, although this is no guarantee; it also depends on the contents of your profile and how common your name is. If your name is Igor Pszczolkowski, you will get better results than John Johnson, Brown, or Smith.

Ziggs has just launched “Ziggs Name Manager.” You buy your domain name through Ziggs, then they handle getting your domain name redirect to your Ziggs profile. Naymz and Brand-Yourself.com have the same offer (coming soon with CV 2.0).

Managing your Personal Brand is not a one-shot deal, but a long-term strategy. You can’t be haphazard about building a truthful and effective Personal Brand. A permanent domain name can help.

IV.     Cultural hurdles: discretion, privacy, non-sharing of information, etc.

Is Personal Branding compatible with every culture? Are there generational differences: digital native vs. digital immigrant?

Promoting your personal brand is important. Still, you may very well be uncomfortable with the very idea of Personal Branding. You may sardonically be thinking, “…only in America” or “So now we’re reduced to ‘selling’ ourselves like a product?” How repulsive! No way! But wait…it is not about selling yourself. It’s about knowing how to sell what you can DO, knowing how to better communicate the qualities that you can bring to a company: your qualifications, expertise, experience, know-how, way of being…

However, this isn’t the biggest problem. In places like France, people will be reticent to embrace Personal Branding because of the information sharing and necessary transparency it involves, especially given the personal nature of the information. For many, the idea of making one’s profile or résumé publicly available on the Web simply doesn’t compute culturally.

According to Pascal Baudry, president of WDHB Consulting and an expert on cultural differences, “The importance of explicitness in American culture is consistent with the Protestant idea that the community—and, as a consequence, the individual—has more to gain than to lose by making as much information as possible available to the public. Conversely, the French protect themselves against such dissemination, which they regard as excessive and potentially hazardous, for instance through their law on Information Technologies and Liberties. Americans see what they have to gain by sharing, whereas the French see what they have to lose by it.” (“French and Americans, the Other Shore” by Pascal Baudry, translated in English by Jean-Louis Morhange. Les Frenchies, Inc. 2005, p. 44. I recommend the book, which you can download for free at http://www.pbaudry.com/cyberlivre/ in PDF format).

What is true for the French culture is of course also true for many cultures worldwide. These obstacles may gradually disappear as companies understand the benefits of encouraging their employees to create their own Personal Brand. In his excellent article, “Quelle marque voulez-vous tatouer sur votre corps ?” (What brand do you want to tattoo on your body?), Gilles Martin approaches Personal Branding from the angle of what companies stand to gain: “It’s the sum of employees’ strong Personal Brands that creates the force and durability of the company brand. For people who have nothing to say about themselves beyond talking about the company they work for, the question to ask is not ‘Are you proud to work for your company?’ but ‘Is your company proud that you work for it?’” I recommend that you read his whole article (in French… sorry!).

This is a win-win situation. Employees who are well known and recognized in their own right add to the prestige of the company, just as a well-known and recognized company adds to the prestige of its employees. Visionary companies should therefore encourage their employees to develop a strong Personal Brand.

The first step is to know yourself better in order to make yourself better known. That’s the first step of your Personal Branding. But then you also need to become recognized, that is, renowned for your qualities. And that means managing your online reputation.

Sources:

Key authors on Personal Branding in the United States

Site for the book Career Distinction. Stand Out by Building your Brand by brand strategy experts William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson:
http://www.careerdistinction.com/

Website of Peter Montoya (expert in Personal Branding):
http://www.petermontoya.com

Articles for further reading:

“Personal Branding to Win the World” by Kishu Gomes.

“The Brand Called You” by Tom Peters

“Web 2.0 and Personal Brand Development Presentation” by Boris Mann.

It is important to protect your personal identity and to promote your professional reputation on the Internet.

I. Why should you protect your personal identity?

Your personal identity isn’t just made up of your first and last names. It also involves the following information:

- Mailing address
- Date of birth
- Personal telephone number
- Personal email address
- IDs / Passwords
- Social security numbers
- Maiden name
- Tax ID
- Driver’s license number
- Credit card number
-…

Thanks to search engines, aggregating data spread out over multiple sites is very easy. Some data is available on your public profile hosted on Plaxo, Myspace, Facebook or Linkedin,… Your date of birth or contact information can be found on social networks but also on services such as Skype for example.

Yet, the aggregation of this personal data is an open invitation to identity theft. A crime that is experiencing tremendous growth in Europe and which already affects millions of Americans and Canadians each year. Here’s what can be done in certain countries with information such as your name, your address and your date of birth:
- Open a bank account in your name in order to take out loans, write bad checks, request credit cards,…
- Buy vehicles, travel, …
- Have phone lines installed
- Create false IDs or passports
- Set up a fake marriage in your name
- …

Thanks to the information that’s available about your personal identity, it is also possible to try to guess your passwords or find the answers to the secret questions that are used to secure access to bank and administrative sites.

There is no need to hack your computer. Collecting the information that you or others have made public on different online services makes all of this possible.

Here are 2 very simple rules to protect your personal identity:

Rule number 1: Do not post your home address on public profiles. Someone could then use it to come and rifle through your trash or your mailbox so as to get the missing information they need to steal your identity. By contrast, you can go ahead and give your address during secure, private transactions, to set up delivery from an ecommerce site for example.

Rule number 2: Do not post your date of birth on the Internet. Some sites allow you to hide your date of birth on your public profile or enable you to specify who may have access to it. There’s always the risk, however, that databases or your ID/password will be hacked. Some services make the date-of-birth field a mandatory one so as to deny access to minors or to enable your friends to wish you a happy birthday. But in reality, the main reason for asking you your date of birth is to be able to send you targeted, age-specific ads. If you find that the date-of-birth field is indeed mandatory, simply fill in bogus information, such as January 1, 1910, just to make sure that your friends understand that that’s not really your birthday!!! In any case, your REAL friends already know your real date of birth

Protecting your personal identity on the Internet is just online common sense!

II. The very vital promotion of your professional reputation

While you need to hide your date of birth and home address, it is important that your first and last names show up in the results pages generated by a search engine query. Having read the first part of this post and understandably daunted by the prospect of identity theft, you could be tempted by total anonymity, absolute invisibility:
- Lack of an online profile or biography detailing your skills or reflecting aspects of your career path
- Use of a pseudonym to participate in online forums, blogs or networks.

If this is your choice, then try to answer the following questions: How will a recruiter react when he can’t find any information about you? Your namesakes — sharing your first and last names — will occupy the space you’ve left vacant. What will be the consequences for you? How will your invisibility be interpreted by your social or professional circle?

In our online life, just as in real life, we have personal and professional spheres. Being anonymous may be useful in our personal activities. The ability to post anonymously allows us to freely express our views on sensitive topics: politics, religion,… Anonymity also allows us to hide our identity while using dating sites or simply preserve our private space.

However, unless you’re retired, have job security for life (e.g. civil servants,…) or are working in a job where your reputation is not at stake, it is essential to have an online professional reputation. The main gateway to your reputation is “Your first name + Your last name” being visible in the results pages of search engines.

Leaving a trail in a blog or a forum, that may hurt your reputation, wouldn’t be the worst thing which could befall you. The worst thing would be to have people be unable to find any traces of you, to not have an online reputation. 77% of US recruiters perform online searches about applicants. 7% of all queries entered on search engines are about a person’s name.

This lack of an online professional reputation could be interpreted as:

- A lack of transparency
- A refusal to share information
- A person with nothing to say
- Technophobia
- Risk aversion

Of course, it’s possible that a recruiter wouldn’t see it that way and that he would simply deem your online invisibility as neutral, unimportant, even insignificant factor. But how will he react if you’re the only invisible person in a pool of 10 applicants? What would you do in his place? This now becomes a question of risk management.

Your professional reputation on the Internet sends back an indirect brand image: the capacity and willingness to take risk, your personal initiative, the ability to share information, to put forth ideas or use the information technologies that are the core competencies of today’s organizations. The day is fast approaching when the choice between two candidates will come down to how easily their reputation can be evaluated, the losing party being the harder person to evaluate. Promoting your online professional reputation is thus useful in:
- looking for a job, making a name for yourself
- offering services (consultants, freelance,…)
- highlighting your expertise
- boosting your career
- building and promoting your brand image (Personal Branding)

Besides, you may have namesakes. Your Internet invisibility leaves the field to these namesakes. An anecdote may shed light on the problem. A consultant who had grown tired of having his clients ask him how long he had been making pottery, finally discovered on Google that a namesake was an expert … potter. Nothing serious and rather amusing as an example. But what if your namesake was also a consultant himself in your field. In this instance, you would run the very real risk that his reputation would become yours!

Just as in real life, our online life is made up of risks and opportunities! No more, no less. The Internet is a space in which one must adopt a specific code of conduct in order to avoid identity theft. It is also a place which enables professionals to emerge from anonymity and effectively differentiate themselves.

To dig deeper into the topic of identity theft, here are a couple of complementary reads in their order of relevance:

A government website (Ontario, Canada): What information identity thieves look for and how they get this information?

Identity theft (Wikipedia)

Identity Theft – A Primer (Canadian government source)

Identity Theft Resource Center: a nonprofit organization dedicated exclusively to the understanding and prevention of identity theft.

Post 1/3: How to manage your professional reputation

Post 2/3: Building your Reference Network

Post 3/3: Tools to build and manage your reference network

As I wrote at the end of my last post, your professional references are an asset not only in any job search but, most of all, in your career as a whole.

I hope that this post will help you become aware of the need for and usefulness of taking your disparate references and turning them into a true network: a Reference Network.

A Reference Network is very different from a Contacts Network. That’s why it’s important that you build 2 networks:

1. Your Contacts Network

These are the people in your Rolodex: all the persons with whom you’ve made contact at least once, either in person or virtually. This network will allow you to retrieve your references and be connected with the right people to find a job, clients, experts or partners.

2. Your Reference Network

This is your network of social and professional references, what we might also call your Trust Network. This network will help to boost your career within your current company, but will also prove helpful in any future job search.

Understanding the concept of a Contacts Network is easy; however, the concept of a Trust Network encompassing your references isn’t as obvious!

I. What is a Reference Network?

In life, we live and work with many people and we build trust relations with them. Our mobility (city, country, job changes….) requires that our network be rebuilt on a regular basis. Each time we meet a new person, a neighbor, a colleague or a new manager, we start from scratch with trust-building. It will take several months or years to recreate these trust links. Today, our trust relations are “intangible” since they can not be measured. They are invisible since the people who trust you are actually the only ones who know they trust you. So, it’s necessary to externalize and make visible your trust relations with people around you.

Today, the effectiveness of social networking is a proven fact. Each one of us belongs to a number of different social networks – through family, friends, school, extra curricular activities or work. But there is one network which is much more significant than the others – your Reference Network! Your Reference Network encompasses all of your networks and gathers all your social and professional references together. This network is informal and invisible but it exists! So, it’s necessary to make your Reference Network visible through recommendations and tags. It allows you to promote your Reference Network among the very people you need to further enhance your professional life (prospects, recruiters, managers, etc).

Anyone you have contact with can potentially be part of your Reference Network. It can be your managers, employees, colleagues, partners, customers, or suppliers. Recent graduates may want to include former teachers and other social references such as friends, non-profit organizations, or blog readers.

Your social references are made up of all persons from your social and professional life who can emphasize your strong points, your values or your expertise in social situations. Highlighting your skills will provide significant added value to your career. Your social references show assets that people may not have noticed in your professional career. Examples are: your creativity, your hidden expertise, your special skills, your leadership in a sports team, your artistic talents, etc. These elements are not always emphasized or they get lost at the very bottom of your CV (in “Miscellaneous”). It’s time to give them room to shine! Do you regret a path taken and want to find a way out? Use your Social Reference Network to help you out.

II. Who can belong to my Reference Network?

Take a look at your résumé to identify those persons who can belong to your Reference Network.

- For each position within your company, identify all the people who could potentially belong to your network: your managers, associates, colleagues, clients, suppliers or partners.

- For every one of your extra-professional activities, within a club or association for example, identify all the people who can contribute a relevant perspective about your skills or personal qualities, as well as shed light on the way you have performed your duties (in particular within a club or association).

Have you lost track of your references? It’s easy to connect with people who still work with you, but what about those who no longer do? You’re applying with a new company for a position which you’ve held in the past but, you’re finding it impossible to contact your former manager whose recommendation could clinch it for you. Your current manager can’t provide an evaluation of your performance in this type of position. You’re stuck.

Are you one of these professionals who lose their references over time? If this is the case, now’s the time to take action!

Here are some possible search options to help you retrieve your references:

- Search engines or directories targeted at finding people: CV 2.0, Spock, Ziki, Ziggs, Zoominfo, Wink, Yoname or Naymz.

- Social networks: Facebook, Copainsdavant, Viadeo, Linkedin, 6nergies, Tribe or Ecademy

- White pages in normal phone books, even though these are not very efficient if you don’t at least know the current city in which the person lives.

- General search engines such as Google: type in, in quotes, the « first name last name » of the person you seek. If this search yields too many results, try adding distinctive elements to your query: university, company,… To find their email address, type in « first name last name mail » or « first name last name @ » (this will limit search results to pages which feature e-mail addresses).

In theory, your whole professional circle could belong to your Reference Network. However, you don’t trust everyone indiscriminately and the reverse holds true as well. That’s why you need to define a sphere of trust!

III. Knowing how to define a sphere of trust

To quote an excerpt from an earlier post on our digital lives: You can trust someone to do certain things but not others. A Formula 1 driver is a priori someone you can trust to drive a race car. But would you ask him to build your house? The trust you place in a person isn’t absolute; it is context-specific. With each person in your reference network, you must define a “context of trust” (a “sphere of trust”) with respect to roles, abilities or personal qualities. You can not say you trust someone without specifying the context in which you trust them.

For example, here is how Jack could define his context of trust with respect to his colleague Martin (defining what is inside and what is outside the sphere of trust):

-> Jack trusts Martin when it comes to managing a team, marketing and creativity (roles, abilities and personal qualities within Jack’s sphere of trust regarding Martin)

-> Jack doesn’t know whether he can trust Martin when it comes to managing a project, maintaining computer systems or when it comes to his loyalty towards the company (outside Jack’s sphere of trust)

-> Jack doesn’t trust Martin when it comes to managing innovation, accounting or when it comes to his punctuality (outside Jack’s sphere of trust)

In summary:

My Reference Network or Trust Network = People I trust and people who trust me (mutual trust).

With each person within your reference network, you define a sphere of trust. This sphere of trust can include roles, areas of expertise, abilities and personal qualities. These elements serve as the basis for the trust you place in a person within your network. They will be described through recommendations of your references, either verbally (during interviews with recruiters) or in writing (letters of recommendation). Inversely, outside the sphere of trust, you’re not comfortable saying you trust this person.

You can find numerous tools on the internet to help you build your networks (both contacts and reference networks). The internet is itself a network of networks, and social networks are a natural outgrowth of these. In the next post, we will take a look at general (Linkedin, Viadeo, Ecademy…) and specialized tools for managing your references and recommendations (CV 2.0, Repvine, Naymz,…). Tune in next time!

Post 1/3: How to manage your professional reputation

Post 2/3: Building your Reference Network

Post 3/3: Tools to build and manage your reference network

The systems used to manage reputation on specific e-commerce sites (eBay, PriceMinister,…) help sellers and buyers achieve recognition as « good sellers » (those who deliver within the agreed-upon time frame) or « good buyers » (those who pay for their order).

Freelancers have at their disposal a number of sites they can use to connect with potential clients. For example on Odesk, a website dedicated to computer specialists, each project is evaluated with a gold-star system (ranging from 1 to 5) along several dimensions. This facilitates the evaluation of freelancers’ reputation.

However, besides these particular cases, how can a professional’s reputation be evaluated?

It is customary for recruiters and employers to evaluate the reputation of a professional based on his references and his recommendations (either written, in the form of a letter of recommendation, or oral).

After an interview, these 2 elements enable a recruiter to validate his impression of the candidate and to further explore certain aspects of the candidate’s career path and personality. In this respect, they provide invaluable insights into the candidate’s reputation.

As a professional, it is therefore crucial to actively and effectively manage your references throughout your career, and not solely when looking for employment. The goal is to build a durable professional reputation.

I. Who are your references?

In most countries the emphasis is put on professional references; but in some countries, however, social references will also be of interest.

Depending on the position you seek, you can choose your professional references from among your former managers, colleagues, associates, clients, suppliers or partners. If you’re just starting out in your professional career, or if you’re a student, you can reach out to your former professors.

If you present social references, you can choose friends or people from your social or community-based network, but obviously not family members (zero credibility!). One should take note, however, that for particular recruiters, references from friends, neighbors or parents, carry no weight, no matter the country.

The time to build one’s network is when everything is running smoothly. It will be a little late to do so when everything’s already gone to pot. In general, if you remain in your corner, help will not be there for you on the day when something goes wrong. The same principle applies for your references. It is better to think about capitalizing on your references when everything’s going well rather than wait to be in the unemployment line. Do you know the difference between a winner and a loser? A loser has a plan in case something goes well; a winner a plan in case something goes wrong. Once unemployed, in a couple of months you could lose touch with your former colleagues.

Being fired is not the only thing that can destroy your career. So can office gossip. It is therefore crucial to seek the kind of references that will highlight your professional qualities and your skills, and defend your reputation if necessary, any time it’s feasible.

To summarize, your references are all the people in your professional and social circles who might become part of your network of references. This network will help show that you are trustworthy and defend your reputation. In the next post, we will deal with the particulars of how to go about building and managing one’s network of references (or trust network).

II. How do recruiters carry out their work?

For a recruiter, to call references is to try to get an insight into the candidate’s actions as seen by others (this is the so-called 360° feedback).

A. How does the recruiter select your references?

In general, a recruiter will ask a candidate to provide him with three references, two former managers and a person of the candidate’s choosing for example (the candidate will have to justify his choice).

Depending on the profiles and the job opening, the recruiter will try to obtain information from different people who have known the candidate at various points along his career path, in different roles and positions. The goal is to gather information from different echelons of the workplace hierarchy: superiors, colleagues, associates, suppliers and clients.

Recruiters often prioritize the views of former managers because a priori they are in the best position to judge their subordinates’ abilities and to notice up-and-comers. The views and opinions of colleagues and clients are less relevant because they lack an overall picture.

In general, the recruiter will seek to:

1 – Validate the candidate’s previous performance: results achieved, pattern of available-resource utilization (optimal or not), strategic vision, skill set, expertise, etc… This is to verify that the opening is suitable for the candidate and that he will be able to handle the job’s evolving requirements.

2 – Evaluate the candidate’s personality: reliability, responsiveness, effectiveness, people skills, ethics, ambition, potential, autonomy, creativity, thoroughness, adaptability, ability to work in a team, head for business, etc…

B. How does the conversation between the recruiter and the person providing the reference unfold?

The recruiter contacts the person providing the reference, most often by phone.

1. The recruiter wants to make sure that your reference (the person he’s talking to) is reliable. As the conversation proceeds, the recruiter will gauge the way they answer his questions, their understanding of the subject, their spontaneity, their silences and above all, the quality of the information they provide. The goal is to determine if your reference is sincere or if they’re withholding something. The recruiter thus checks the sincerity of the words spoken.
In the event that the information provided by different people does not match, the recruiter will dig deeper.

2. The conversation often begins by going over the particulars of the working relationship between the reference and the candidate: the circumstances, the respective posts held at the time, the kinds of projects undertaken, the length and frequency of interaction during the working relationship.

The classic questions focus on:

- Strong Points – Weaknesses or Qualities – Faults
- Successes – Failures
- Behavior in a team, behavior with clients
- Management style
- Reaction under stress

But questions such as the following are also common:
- If you had to give advice to person X to help them develop their skills or improve in general, what would that advice be?
- What advice would you give to their future boss about the best way to fully utilize the talent and potential of said person X?
- Is it your impression that person X has what it takes to keep moving forward in his career?
- If I were to speak to your colleagues regarding person X, would they tell me the same things you did about this person? Who would differ and why?
- (After describing the job for which person X has applied) In your opinion, would person X make a good candidate? Are there aspects that would need monitoring, improvement?
And finally the typical question: Would you be willing to rehire them? The false notes, the tone of voice, the hesitations are all taken into account!

3. Certain recruiters have specialized firms perform background checks on candidates: university degrees, debts or criminal files. See for example : Info Cubic

To summarize, here are the key points:
- Has the candidate been truthful?
- Does the information gathered from different references match?
- Does the information gathered from the references confirm the impression formed during the conversations?

In this way, recruiters validate that they were not taken in by the candidate during the interview. Manipulative persons abound! This is necessary since they are putting their credibility and reputation on the line with regards to future employers.

III. How to prepare yourself

It is important to anticipate recruiters’ request for references even if you’re not currently looking for work (see: the difference between a loser and a winner!). You would therefore be well advised to make a list, right now, of all the people who might contribute a relevant perspective about your profile (more practical details on this in the next post).

If you’re currently looking for work, you can have your reference read this post in preparation of the coming conversation with recruiters! The goal should be to allow them to give answers with precision and authenticity.

If you know that one of your references will give negative feedback on certain aspects of your shared working relationship, it is better to preempt them by giving your version of the facts. In general, the more open you are with the recruiter, the more he will trust you.

It’s also possible that your reference will not be very positive in their assessment of you because they resent your leaving the organization. They can pay you back indirectly! It is thus helpful to describe for the recruiter the context of your departure.

If you lie on a single aspect of your resume, you undermine the credibility of the whole document. A lot of resumes are faked; candidates lie and so do their references. This is part of the way things are. This is not an effective way, however, to build one’s reputation for the long-term! Thanks to people search engines, Google, social networks and tools designed for the management of online reputation, the Internet will soon make it a lot easier to track fraudsters. If you’re among them, now is the time to act…

IV. Your references: an asset for tomorrow, today and always!

A lot of professionals face 2 major problems when it comes to their references: losing them and using them in crisis mode (when everything’s going wrong).

How do we lose our references?

References are at the core of your professional reputation. The more of them you have, the better. However, you regularly lose these references: loss of contact information, retirement,…

The rate at which you lose your references is commensurate with:
- your professional mobility (change of organization, roles,…)
- your geographical mobility (change of country, region,…)

How to best take advantage of your references starting now

Why call upon your references only when you’re seeking a job? Your references could help you get a promotion, a raise or even a new position!

Your references are at the core of what could be called your trust network. What are you doing to manage your trust network? Not much? Then you’ll definitely want to read the next post

This post benefited from contributions from the following: Guy Djandji – Béatrice Sevat (CRM Web Manager, DANONE group) – Alexandra Thusy – Jean-Michel Putto (president of GN, a consulting firm specializing in strategic development) – Valentine Baud & Florent Lafarge