Reinventing You. Dorie Clark
of that is that I can be very intellectual, and maybe there should be more of a balance with creativity.”
Perhaps the most startling insights were about her personal life: “It was the first time somebody said out loud, ‘I want to see you with a child; I think you should explore it.’ Up until that point, I wasn’t sure I wanted to have kids, but that comment made it more relevant for me, and something I should be thinking about more carefully.”
After the session, she sat down with her professional coach and developed a six-month and yearlong plan following up on the insights and advice she’d received, from increasing her connections to other consultants to doing more work locally. The focus group, says Mary, “took me to the next level in terms of my professional development. It helped me refocus my consulting practice to include more training and development, which I loved doing and was really good at.” But the most important change was personal. A year and a half later, her daughter was born.
Your Online Presence
These days, a major part of your personal brand is online. Sure, your friends and colleagues’ perceptions are based on your day-to-day interactions, but if you have even minor celebrity (you blog for an industry website) or you’re job hunting (and people are doing basic background checks), the broader world is forming its image of you courtesy of Facebook and Google. Your first step? Reviewing—and controlling—your online paper trail, because if you don’t do it first, it may come back to haunt you.
In fact, the New York Times profiled a company called Social Intelligence, which “scrapes the internet for everything prospective employees may have said or done online in the past seven years” and assembles a dossier on the candidate.2 It has ferreted out racist remarks, drug references, sexually explicit material, and weapons fetishists. Hopefully that’s not your shtick. But even if you’re not a gunrunner or trolling for OxyContin on Craigslist (like one job candidate Social Intelligence reviewed), you still may not be in the clear.
Your online presence may be spit-polished, with only your wise quotations in industry journals and incisive blog posts about the future of business. Then again, you may not appear online exactly as you’d like to be perceived. Your plight may be banal—you’re a fanatical runner and the only thing that comes up is your race times. It may be your parents’ fault (if your name is Joe Smith, search engine optimization is a cruel joke). It may be someone else’s fault (one guy I know was plagued first by sharing the same name as a former MTV Asia VJ and later a congressman forced to resign due to a sex scandal).
But sometimes the picture that emerges is downright frightening, as was the case with a young woman I once met with as a favor to a friend. She was obviously smart, just finishing graduate school at an Ivy League university and looking for a position in marketing. We had a good chat, but at the end of the meeting, she leaned in and lowered her eyes. “There’s something else I should mention,” she said. “I’m not sure if you Googled me before we met, but . . . there are some negative things being said about me online.”
It turns out she had a deranged ex-boyfriend who was posting defamatory things about her online. Because of her distinctive name, his rants littered any online search—and made her life and job search very difficult (she was pursuing legal action). Of course, the fulminations of a jilted ex shouldn’t be part of your personal brand. But thanks to the internet, even the most private of matters can quickly attach to your public persona.3
Don’t Stop at Facebook
Review everything, because companies like Social Intelligence will. They report that less than a third of the content they dredge up comes from major sites like Facebook or Twitter. Instead, they trawl lesser-known spaces, where it may feel “safer” to post—and lead candidates to mistakes. Comments on old blog posts, bulletin boards, Craigslist ads, or old Yahoo! Groups archives are all targets, not to mention photos and videos (which may have been uploaded by friends with poorer judgment than your own).
In addition to your first pass, you may want to have someone else review the data as well. Everyone knows a picture of you with a bong is probably ill advised. But some people might feel that membership in a “This Is America—I Shouldn’t Have to Press 1 for English” Facebook group is witty, while others could see it as racist. (Yes, that was a real case vetted by Social Intelligence.) Getting another perspective can help you discover blind spots and areas where your idea of “just a joke” could be badly misinterpreted.
Try This
Search for yourself not just on Google, but also on other search engines such as Bing and membership sites (that may have various privacy settings) like Facebook.
Search for your name in quotation marks—as in “Dorie Clark”—so you’ll only find hits with that exact phrase. (Otherwise, you may turn up any document, however long, that happens to have both words in it.) Don’t forget to search for variations of your name, including common misspellings or nicknames.
Don’t give up too soon. Scroll through every page, because you may find a smoking gun on page twenty-six of your Google search. If something malicious, false, or inappropriate is out there, someone’s going to find it eventually, and for your sake, it better be you.
Seek Out Patterns in Past Performance
You may also have access to hard data about how others perceive you, namely, performance reviews from your job (or previous ones). Not every employer has its act together enough to require formal sit-downs and evaluations, so don’t worry if it’s just not available. But especially in larger organizations, you’re likely to have a paper trail. (If you’ve applied to graduate programs or for specific fellowships, you may also have access to recommendation letters others have written for you, which are a treasure trove of intelligence.)
First, gather the material, and then take a step back. You’re going to have opinions about everyone who’s written a word about you. Maybe your former boss claimed you were fanatically detail-oriented, but you only acted that way because she was so disorganized; nothing would have gotten done if you hadn’t taken the reins. Maybe your grad school professor criticized you for being late on a few assignments, but didn’t take into account that your dad was diagnosed with cancer that semester.
It’s natural to get defensive when you see yourself evaluated on paper and attempt to justify any criticisms. Try not to. We’re not concerned with one person’s hobbyhorse issue (“Jeff is a great employee, but he keeps confusing ‘there’ with ‘their’ in his memos!”). It’s when everyone (or almost everyone) says your spelling, your micromanaging, or your lateness is a problem that you should take it seriously, and do the same with your strengths. (Stein, the former Radcliffe career counselor, observes that her clients are often keenly aware of their weaknesses, and find it much harder to appreciate their positive attributes.)
Are You Too Likable?
One caveat is to be aware of the “likability conundrum.” Harvard Business School Professor Amy Cuddy notes that many people view warmth and competence as “inversely related”—that is, if you’re very nice, you must be a little dumb.4 That’s bad news for female executives, who are often stereotyped as, and culturally trained to be, extremely warm.
Indeed, a study in a psychology journal revealed that in performance evaluations of junior attorneys at a Wall Street law firm, “technical competence was more heavily weighted in men’s numerical ratings,” as compared to interpersonal warmth for the female attorneys.5 Thus, while the women were lauded much more effusively in the comments section, the men received higher overall numerical ratings (and you can guess which was given more weight in determining promotions).
I remember once overhearing