Do You Know Who You’re Recruiting?
In today’s digital world, it seems like we have so much information available at our fingertips, yet it’s not always easy to get a clear picture of who somebody really is. An online reputation audit cuts through the noise, allowing you to assess whether someone will be the right person to recruit or work alongside.
In this article, we’ll walk through the steps of how to conduct an audit report online, share some useful audit report examples and evaluate how you can make social media screening and background screening a key part of your recruitment solutions.
What is an Online Reputation Audit?
What is an online reputation definition? Online reputation audits are a mirror of how a person is presented on the internet, allowing recruiters and employers to learn more about an individual, and assess the risks and benefits of working with that individual.
Today, online reputation audits for individuals are increasingly in demand. Now, and certainly in the future, your personal reputation and your professional reputation are more subject to scrutiny than ever before.
You only need to look at news headlines surrounding the likes of Steve Easterbrook, Jeff Fairburn, Phillip Green, and Prince Andrew, to realise the risks, consequences, and costs associated with a personal reputation crisis.
Conducting your own reputation search is a good step towards building a picture of how you are presented online. You may be surprised (pleasantly or less so) at the results!
Try it yourself, type in your name and see what comes up in the search results. Focus particularly on that first page of results, which is the online equivalent of the front page of a national newspaper, your own personal ‘headlines’. Ask yourself the following:
Are you visible online?
Do you like what you see?
Does this basic screening search reflect you in a good light, and present you as trustworthy?
Would you hire you, or do business with you?
Would you want to be associated with you?
Does it really reflect who you are now?
Or is the past interfering with your future reputation?
While this is a basic exercise, you may have discovered things about your online reputation that are surprising or unexpected. A more thorough online reputation audit discovers, and assesses, all of the above and even more.
How to Conduct an Online Reputation Audit for an Individual
An audit report can be part of a larger HR screening process, or you may simply want to run a reputation report to help you make a better business assessment about an individual you’re looking to hire, work with or partner with.
An online reputation report should touch all the digital bases, including all the key channels of online communication—such as search engines, press sites and social media screening services—as well as looking at areas of potential concern or interest, such as whether the person could be a PEP (Politically Exposed Person) or feature on any sanction lists.
An audit report format should contain an analysis of all of these online ‘touchpoints’, identifying any particular information that could be particularly damaging to a person’s reputation or credibility. Of course, not everything published or shared online is truthful, but an audit report is designed to help you filter through the fluff and inconsistencies, and present you with a well-rounded picture of how someone comes across online. At the end of the process, you want to aim to have built a detailed audit report as well as a shorter reputation report card that summarises the important data.
Let’s create our own DIY online reputation check as an audit report example. This can help you to recognise how an online reputation check can be conducted in order to assess weaknesses and areas for improvement in a potential future audit on someone else. For this you will need to identify:
How you want to be viewed by people online.
Who your key audiences are.
What you want your target audiences to associate with you, both personally and professionally.
How and where you want to engage with and influence people online.
Then, brainstorm a list of search terms you think you need to monitor.
In your online search, it’s worth including:
Your full name.
Your professional interests and sector.
From the search results of your DIY audit, first sift out anything irrelevant, such as results for different individuals with the same name. As you record the results, mark which items are positive, negative or neutral.
Finally, review your results so that you can get a clear picture of the overall impression of your personal reputation online. Do you have mostly neutral and positive results, or are there any obvious negative search results? Keep in mind that just one or two negative results can impact on the overall impression you have of an individual’s reputation, and affect the outcome of a whole audit report, so it’s worth paying attention to how to minimise or rectify these negativities.
What Should Be Included in a Reputation Audit?
While a DIY reputation audit, as described above, can be used to get a quick sense of someone’s reputation online, a professional audit report will always provide you with more detailed and accurate information that can be used as part of a recruitment process.
Professional HR screening services can produce reputation audit reports that will be able to cover the following:
What people are saying or have said about an individual online, on what sites and social media platforms, and when.
Search engine results for the individual, and how visible they are on Google.
An assessment of the person’s online sites, profiles, social media accounts, personal content, PR, images, videos and more.
An assessment of ranking content/sites/forums and more for the individual.
The factors that are driving people’s personal and professional perceptions about the person.
How positive and negative content is affecting the individual’s online reputation.
Suggest actions for dealing with negative content online.
Suggest actions for promoting existing positive content online.
Put forward a strategy and action plan with recommendations for short- and long-term success.
What are the Best Recruitment Tools for Online Reputation Management?
While a detailed audit report is desirable for the final stages of the recruitment process, there are also other tools you can use to assess someone’s reputation before you commit to a full-scale audit report, including HR tech, social media screening and smart background searching. Let’s look at some of these options in a little more detail.
Social media screening services
Social media screening companies offer a basic service for researching what type of content an individual shares on their personal and/or business accounts on Instagram, X (Twitter), TikTok, Facebook and YouTube. You can use social media screening for employment decisions, or generally if you want to get a sense of how someone presents themselves online.
YOONO: Smart background searches
At the outset of the recruitment process, preliminary screening searches can save recruitment agencies and in-house HR teams a huge amount of time, effort and expense. An online tool like YOONO allows you to harness the power of smart AI search to scour every corner of the internet, giving you insights into someone’s online presence, educational background, job history and published media, as well as additional information such as if the individual is a PEP (Politically Exposed Person).
Conclusion: Your Reputation at Stake?
Under online scrutiny, it becomes quickly apparent whether someone is likely to be perceived as trustworthy or not, but an online reputation audit can bring even more detailed results to light, helping you to assess whether that person is going to be a good fit for you and your business.
For even more clarity, it’s advisable to run an initial reputation check through a service like YOONO, which can help you to spot unusual content, interesting details or intriguing gaps in someone’s online map.
Without the expense of conducting a full audit report, you can use YOONO as part of a wider recruitment strategy, using its fast and smart search technology to quickly assess how somebody appears online, at the very outset of the recrutiment process. Try it today, and you’ll see how quick and convenient it is to search for anyone online.
