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Compromising photos. Racy language. Drunken debauchery.

Ashley Baker has seen it all online.

Ms. Baker is the assistant director of student-athlete services at Bowling Green State University. It’s her job to make sure the athletes adhere to the university’s code of conduct in their online profiles at Facebook and MySpace.

If she sees something that is against the code — something that may reflect negatively on the university — she advises the student to “clean up” their profile.

As Ms. Baker learned, that code applies to her as well.

When a supervisor found some content on Ms. Baker’s Facebook profile to be slightly questionable, including her membership to the “UT (expletive) Sucks Club,” as well as photos of her at bars with friends, she was asked to remove the potentially offensive materials.

Ms. Baker complied. The last thing she wanted was to be viewed as hypocritical.

“Advising students what’s appropriate or inappropriate, you don’t want to be the one displaying that also,” she said.

Her advice to students, as well as recent college graduates entering the work force: be mindful of your online presence.

“[You] have to pay more attention to what you have on your profile because you never know who’s going to look at it, and what it’s going to mean to them,” she said.

Ms. Baker’s story, while ironic, fortunately wasn’t damaging.

But there are plenty of those tales to be found, as potential employers, universities, and recruiters go online to learn more about you, and see if you have any “digital dirt.”

Digging deep
Digital dirt can be photos on a MySpace page, postings to message boards, personal blogs, and group affiliations — any online trace that tells someone more about you than you might care to share. Increasingly, searching for digital dirt is becoming standard procedure by recruiters and employers performing background checks on job applicants.

And it’s not just college students or recent graduates who are being searched.

A recent survey of executive recruiters by ExecuNet, an executive and career business network based in Norwalk, Conn., found that 86 percent of the recruiters acknowledged using search engines such as Google to learn additional information about a job candidate. And 44 percent said they have eliminated a candidate from job consideration because of what they discovered about him online.

Robyn Greenspan, editor in chief with ExecuNet, said she has spoken with many job candidates who have lost out on employment opportunities because of what recruiters dug up online.

In fact, finding a job became so difficult for one woman — the victim of negative message board postings and blogs — Ms. Greenspan said she was virtually unemployable.

In desperation, the woman mounted a personal public relations campaign by joining charitable organizations, and speaking to various industry groups.

The goal was to push back all the negative information about her on Google by several pages, and replace it with positive press as the top search links.

Her efforts were rewarded, and she was hired for another executive-level position.

“The negative stuff that’s out there ... there’s no way to erase it,” Ms. Greenspan said. “If you put more positive thingsout there you can elevate those results and you can suppress the negative things.”

In an extreme example, former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay opted to counter the negativity of online searches for “Enron scandal” by buying a paid link to the term.

When “Enron scandal” was Googled, a paid link to “Enron information” appeared on the right-hand side of the page, and would direct traffic to www.kenlay.com, Lay’s personal Web site. On his site the ousted executive then presented his version of the corporation’s financial scandal.

Such a strategy is cost-prohibitive for most, and even then, only works with combating negative information available on search engines.

Keep it to yourself
So what about Facebook and MySpace profiles, where employers can freely visit? How does one safeguard an online profile?

Simple: keep anything that could hurt your image private.

“Most people who are trying to get a job or care what people think of them will set their privacy settings,” said Montana Miller, assistant professor of pop culture at BGSU. “For an employer to see someone’s profile ... it would be involved,” such as enlisting the aid of someone who has access to the private content.

Adjusting privacy settings on a profile to control access to the information is relatively simple, requiring just a few clicks of the mouse. Even so, not everyone bothers with enabling the feature.

Ms. Miller said she visits the Facebook pages of her incoming freshmen before the start of the school year, and while most of the profiles are private, there are a few that are open to her.

“I’m regularly pretty appalled by the stuff they put on their profiles ... but on the other hand, that Facebook represents their personal social life. They didn’t create the profile for me. Even though I may be able to see it because they didn’t put the private setting on, I’m not their audience.”

It’s also easy to innocently post something on a profile and forget about it, and not think about it bothering someone, as Ms. Miller recently learned firsthand.

She was asked to appear on Dr. Phil as an expert on digital dirt. It wasn’t until later that Ms. Miller realized she had posted something negative about the popular syndicated talk show on her Facebook profile. When she called the Dr. Phil producers to learn if she was still scheduled to appear on the program, she was told no, that regional experts were being used instead, leaving Ms. Miller to wonder if she wasn’t victim of her own digital dirt.

“I thought it was quite ironic and yet funny,” she said. “The very thing they want me to talk about, in a way, ends up something that happened to me.”

Clean up your profile
While there’s certainly nothing illegal about using the Internet as a tool to learn more about someone, some groups wonder how effective it is.

Or even if what they uncover is accurate.

For example, when Googling a job candidate by the name of John Smith, who’s to say the John Smith found online with photos of him drunk and passed out on a lawn is the same John Smith who has applied for a job with an accounting firm?

That’s why some groups advise against using the Internet to screen job applicants.

“We have a process we follow. Referrals are huge, checking with the previous employer,” said Lisa Olvera, a sales account executive with Corporate Intelligence Consultants, a private investigative firm based in Perrysburg that performs, among other things, background checks on potential employees.

“I know HR professionals that look at MySpace and YouTube. They look at these things ... [but] it’s all hearsay. It’s not documented. We advise [them] not to. It’s just not the best practice out there.”

Plus, the reality is the time and effort involved in large online searches make it impossible for many organizations such as universities to use the online sleuthing technique.

“We receive 14,000 applicants for undergraduate admissions” annually, said Kevin Kucera, associate vice president for enrollment management at the University of Toledo. “It would be totally impossible for us to do anything.”

But for college students entering the workplace, cleaning up online profiles should be part of the application process, along with creating a resume and buying a suit.

“It’s increasingly common for employers to visit students’ Facebook pages to see how that student is portrayed online,” said JoAnn Kroll, director of BGSU’s career center. “When we caution students about all the preparatory work to get ready for the job search, I would add to clean up Facebook and clean up anything you do not want your mom or grandmother to read about.”

Ms. Kroll also urges students to search their name on search engines — a practice known as “narcisurfing” — to see what’s in cyberspace for anyone to read.

A fiery posting to a left-wing political message board three years ago, for example, could haunt a student when applying for a government job.

“I think the perception all along was that [the Internet] was safe,” she said. “But it’s not that hard to check.”

Laura Israel, a 24-year-old student working on a master’s degree at BGSU, isn’t concerned with what future employers could learn about her online. She has limited her Internet activities to a Facebook profile, which she keeps fairly private.

“I feel I am smart about what I do and don’t do online — especially in terms of putting personal information out there,” she said in an e-mail interview.

But Ms. Israel is surprised by what information many of her peers share online, usually with strangers.

“I do not think people are careful enough — especially the younger crowd — when it comes to expressing feelings, thoughts, interests and other personal information on these pages,” Ms. Israel said. “I know many people who are very naive on [MySpace and Facebook], and are completely oblivious to the fact that parents and potential employers really do look at these sites.”

‘Stay on top of it’
Digital dirt is a relatively new phenomenon, the result of the marriage between the Information Age and the need for self-expression and individualism.

While personal information was available on the Internet long before Google came along a decade ago, it was the popular search engine and its progeny that made that information even more quickly and conveniently available.

“Search engines made it much easier for us to do research, whether it was for a job, whether it was as a reporter, or whether it was research for investments,” Ms. Greenspan said. “And the more time we spend online, the more digital footprints we have.”

Contrary to popular belief, those “footprints” don’t disappear — even when a Web site goes away.

The “Wayback Machine” at www.archive.org maintains online data from 10 billion Web pages dating back to 1996; however, searches are limited to Web sites only, meaning there’s no option to search someone’s name.

And not all digital footprints are bad, either.

For some recruiters, not finding online information about a job candidate is as bad as finding digital dirt. In fact, the same poll of executive recruiters found that 70 percent were more likely to hire a candidate if they found positive information about him.

“You should have an online presence,” said Ms. Greenspan. “Some recruiters say, if I can’t find your name online then you can’t be as good as you say you are.”

The key, she suggests, is to control what is available to the public, and to be “proactive” if there is a problem.

Ms. Greenspan recommends signing up for a “Google alert,” in which the search engine e-mails you when your name appears online, along with a link to the information.

“Just put your name in quotes, see what comes up and set up the alert,” she said. “You’ve got to stay on top of it.”

Contact Kirk Baird at:kbaird@theblade.com or 419-724-6734

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