I am the real Jon Heller (according to me)

I was reading one of my favorite sites today, Lifehacker, when I noticed a link to an article entitled How to look good when your recruiter googles you. Then I noticed an article via Digg called Why You May Need an Online Persona. To top it all off, my father sent me a scan of an article from the Cleveland Plain Dealer about online reputation and how it can effect your job search.

Luckily, I am not currently searching for a job (and hopefully won’t be doing that again anytime soon). However, I did notice that a google search for Jon Heller pulled up some random results that had absolutely nothing to do with me. Interestingly enough, the first result is a director of computer technology, born the same year as me. He lives in Botswana though, so I doubt there’d be much of a mistaken identity problem there. Most of the next results are for someone named Kevin Jon Heller, and for some reason I find it insulting that this guy, who has the middle name of Jon, shows up before people with the first name of Jon! Even worse though, the next real result for a Jon Heller is from a site called College Humor, which shows someone with my namesake creating explicit sculptures out of snow.

In any case, that served as a nice catalyst for me to register this domain name … whatever this domain name may be, as I am actually writing this entry before I have registered it. I have to decide between jonheller.net, jon-heller.com, and jonathanheller.com. I have a slight hesitation to get a .net address, though I doubt it would effect google results. It would be nice to have a .com address, but a dash further complicates the URL (especially when I already have to tell people it’s Jon spelled J-o-n). Jonathan Heller is my real, full name, but is certainly a mouthful when my email would be jon@jonathanheller.com. So at least at this point, I plan on settling for the first option.

Back to the subject at hand: I have heard, for about a year now, about the issues of incriminating material online – especially in regards to social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. It always sounded like common sense, i.e., don’t post pictures of yourself doing things you wouldn’t want the general public knowing about. Then I read in the aforementioned articles (and a few others) that anywhere from 25%-75% of employers will actually go googling prospective employees! This surprised me, mostly because of how much I had read about how the average recruiter spends just a few seconds looking at a cover letter. I suppose that a Google search can reveal much more than a cover letter though, and that does explain its use.

I am not sure if I fully agree with using Google as a tool to research prospective employees. For one thing, Google can reach back to the late nineties, meaning I can still find forum posts I made when I was a junior in high school. Secondly, the problem of mistaken identity seems just too likely. The aforementioned Jon Heller from Botswana is a good example – the fact that there is another person, my age, who is also in computer science with the exact same name seems surprising. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone would look at my name on a resume, google my name, and guess that I was that Jon Heller (maybe assuming that I had moved back from Botswana).

Which is why I am taking the preemptive step of establishing my real identity, so on the off chance that anyone googling Jon Heller looking for me will actually find me. Too bad that will cause problems for all the other Jon Heller’s of the world!