employability: check

[serene]

People have been talking about googling their real names to see if it will hurt their employability. I did it for both sandra vannoy and serene vannoy, and so long as employers don't care that I am bi, poly, and into buttsex, I'm golden.

Comments

[redandfiery.livejournal.com]

Couldn't find any reference to myself, at all. Even my internet nickname brings up nothing more sinister than lj and ebay references. How boring! (And I guess that means my old photos-webpage has been taken down).

Did, however, find no less than *three* namesakes listed in the Measham Parish Census of 1841, amongst a plethora of other people with my slightly unusual surname. I have heard Mum say that the family originally came from Measham, so I suppose that makes sense.

I also discovered that my cousin in Australia's daughter won the under-13 sprint at the Freshwater Carnival last month *grin*. And I found a poem she wrote at school. And she and her brother appear to be keen surfers, with life-saving qualifications. (They have very odd names indeed, so they're easy to find!)

[mistdog.livejournal.com]

My name would be handy if I wanted a job as a football player. I discovered I currently play for Sheffield United.

[baerana.livejournal.com]

My "real" name brings up 1,140,000 results - none of them actually related to me - since I share the name with a popular fictional TV character

Baerana - my soul's real name - otoh, is ALL me :)

See...

[catdeville.livejournal.com]

... this is where being an old school paranoid bbs'er comes in handy {BEG!} I've been using a "handle" online since the late '80s, early '90s and since I've almost always used the same handle, you can find out lots about me online under my *handle*, which an employer will not normally have and a prospective employer will *not* have.

searching by my handle will find out lots of stuff about me that might prejudice an employer who was prone to be prejudiced (and if they aren't, then why are they googling me to snoop into my private life anyway. then again - if they're invading my privacy and prone to not employ me due to prejudice, do I really want to work for them anyway? )

At any rate, I tend to find it humorous that a search under my real name gets you pretty much nada. Lots of information on folks who obviously aren't me ;-) And a few geneology sites which have reference to people with my same first and last name in their geneologies, none of which are me or have any relationship to me. (Long story, that one. The short version is that my father married my mother under and assumed name because he was running from the law, so I'm not related to anyone except my mother and siblings with the same last name.)

Oddly enough my old catdeville AOL website is *still* up (I cancelled that account over 5 years ago) but none of my old websites which were up under my *real* name (with a resume posted) seem to still be active. Interesting that ;-)

[slinkr.livejournal.com]

I just Googled for your real name and discovered that you teach at the same university as soc.motss' Mary Ballard.

Googling for my real name reveals that I'm a software engineer specializing in enterprise Java and web services. If employers have a problem with that, I don't want to work for them anyway.

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

Found:

a "pi" poem I wrote, both on my (little used) webpage and on a couple of pages that I have nothing to do with.

my name in the volunteer list in a PDF copy of the 2002 GLAD annual report (even though I actually got paid for those phone calls I made).

an obituary of my dad.

So, nothing "incriminating".

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

re GLAD.

Now that I think of it, it wasn't just the phone calls. I also stuffed some envelopes (and didn't get paid for that, so "volunteer" designation is legit).

[brotherelf.livejournal.com]

Hmmm.

"Your search - vannoy buttsex bi poly - did not match any documents."

OTOH, I am easy to find: there are many Ulrich Schwarz out there, but I am the one without a degree ;-)

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

Googling my name is never helpful.

[pixiecrinkle.livejournal.com]

I share a last name with a disgustingly popular teenybopper pop star, so I'm pretty hard to find, what with all the porn about her out there.

I have a friend who shares a name with the singer of the theme to "Absolutely Fabulous" and she's impossible to find.

[hopeforyou.livejournal.com]

I haven't worried much about it these days. I did google it in the past, and there were at least 8 people online who shared the same name.... now it's more like 25. I'm sure it's higher than that if I use additional web tools and not just google.

I'm changing my legal name to something entirely new. I'm not sure what, but I can start a whole new on and off-line identity then.

[maestrodog.livejournal.com]

I discovered I'm a British soccer player...:)

[krasota.livejournal.com]

Googling my given name will reveal that I'm involved with genealogy and CFIDS listservs. The CFIDS could conceivably hurt chances of employment. It also shows that I was apparently on a Nabokov listserv at one point in college. I have no clue about that. It turns up a couple other (innocuous) listservs that I don't remember, but with *my* old email address.

My name + middle initial pulls up two hits--both me. One involved with chronic pain (could be troublesome), the other is an FDA docket that I *think* calls for regulation in the fragrance industry. It might be something else, though, perhaps about food allergy labelling.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Ayup. :)

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

You know, I think my brain has a context turnaround time. Although grammatically fine, it took me a few seconds to interpret "golden" properly after the rest of that list.

[j00j.livejournal.com]

heh. The first couple of results *are* me, and are very dignified college-related things. Then there are several pages of Not Me (apparently I'm a long-dead Canadian, various other geneology results, and also a Republican sheriff or something) before one gets to an sf/f con panel that might raise some eyebrows, which does happen to be me, but I'm not worried about it.

Re: employability: check

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

*laughs out loud*. you rock.

[pure-agnostic.livejournal.com]

Top two links for me are all about poly stuff. After that comes my work related stuff and a bunch of technical websites. All of which can be traced back to me.

If you ever become famous, the tabloids are going to have a lot of material on you. (And me too.)

[minimo.livejournal.com]

Surely, all those things are why you are golden to us, Serene one.

The only thing that comes up on my name is a poem that is on a Bad Poetry site. But you've inspired me to post something in my own journal.

[lcohen]

mine either. so many false positives.