Why having an online presence is becoming increasingly important as a job hunter.

The bulk of my clients fall into 2 categories – those that have embraced social media, including LinkedIn and those that have deemed social media as irrelevant and a ‘waste of time’.

Now if you fall into the latter category and you don’t have an online presence and you are a professional, manager or executive, this could increasingly become a liability to progressing your career. Let me explain.

Being online matters for the following reasons:

• Increasingly employers and recruiters are headhunting online.
• The majority of employers and recruiters ‘Google’ you during the job selection process.
• Colleagues, clients and business partners use the web as the first place to go for information about you.
• Without an online presence you are effectively a ‘nobody’ (In the US many employers won’t hire people, who don’t have some sort of online presence. While this trend is not so prevalent in Australia, it is increasingly heading this way).
• You can use your online presence such as LinkedIn and website as a place you can refer people, if undertaking a direct job search, and as a way to control your online reputation.

‘Your visibility (among your target audience) is critical to successful career management. Your Google results powerfully influence those seeking to make decisions about you’.   – Career Distinction:

If you want to check out whether you have an online identity the easiest way to do this, is just go to Google.com and type your name in quotes, such as “John Smith”.

 You can also use the following tools to see the breadth and scope of your current online identity:

HowSociable – www.howsociable.com

Addictomatic – www.addictomatic.com

Once you submit your name for search, it will compile results on the page from sources such as Twitter, Blog Search, Digg, Google Blog Search, FriendFeed, WordPress, Truveo, Flickr, Blinx, Wikio, Yahoo, Tweetmeme, Google Images, Bebo, YouTube, Facebook, and more.

If you currently don’t have any or an effective online presence, your objective over the course of the next few weeks and months is to establish one.

The easiest way to start doing this for a professional, manager, or executive is to set up an effective LinkedIn profile. If you have not got a LinkedIn profile, now is the time to establish one.