If you are the sort of person who is a Net freak and is online several hours a day, you can be sure that you are leaving digital footprints all over the place. Actually, you don’t have to be particularly enamoured of the Net. Even people who send an email once in a while leave a permanent record.

For the average user, the Net is an anonymous place. You can sign up for e-mail accounts or set up a personal website without revealing your name or address. The experts can, however, trace you back. They can dig behind the fa?ade of Mona Lisa from Calcutta and discover that she is actually Montu from Montreal. “Nothing on the Net is secret,” says Sanjay Kumar, a Mumbai-based Internet aficionado.

But how does it matter? In the normal course of things, it shouldn’t. But a whole new business has grown up over mining the Net for information. Ever wondered why your last loan or credit card application was turned down? It could be some “digital dirt” you have left behind on the World Wide Web. That may not matter too much. What will is the information that is being dug up by recruiters.

According to a study by the Connecticut-based ExecuNet, 77 per cent of the recruiters for executive-level candidates use search engines to learn more about them. Some 35 per cent have eliminated a candidate from consideration based on the information uncovered online ? up significantly from 26 per cent just one year ago. “As the amount of personal information available online grows, first impressions are being formed long before the interview process begins,” says ExecuNet CEO Dave Opton.

One would have thought that it would still take some time for this to become a major issue in India. According to available data, Internet penetration in India is just 4.5 per cent with around 50 million users. But the reality is that most job seekers are Internet users. Today, a favoured way of getting a clue to opportunities available is to log on to any of the numerous job sites. Additionally, the biggest recruitment is taking place in sectors such as software services and business process outsourcing (BPO). The people who are applying for and getting these jobs are both technology savvy and Net-friendly.

The BPO space in India has recently been hit with several scams. There have been frauds at the back-office operations of major banks. For the BPO companies, who are providing these services to the banks, an Internet check is another defensive weapon in their armoury.

The problem for the individual is that it is difficult to totally erase something from the Net. In your salad days, you may have ranted against corporate India on your own Geocities website. Now, a mature job seeker, you want to join the establishment. You, of course, erase all references from your website or yank the site altogether. But your rants don’t disappear. Somewhere, somebody ? perhaps even Google ? has copied them.

“One solution is to put up much more on the Net so that the search engines show up these recent references first,” says Kumar. But that involves quite a lot of work. There are other measures you can take (see box). But there is no final answer.

All you can do is look before you leap. Search the Net for references to yourself before applying for a job. It’s called ego surfing. You may discover things about yourself that you never knew.

SAVING FACE

How to avoid blotting your online record

• Use caution. Avoid posting negative comments on blogs, social networking profiles, and online forums. Anything connected to your name online can be viewed as a reflection of your character and integrity.

• Search yourself. Enter your own name into multiple search engines on a monthly basis to stay informed on what personal and professional information exists online.

• Be proactive. Seek advice when attempting to counter or explain “digital dirt”.

• Be honest. If the academic qualifications, company information, and titles on your resume don’t match with what’s found online, potential employers will be quick to move on.

Source: ExecuNet