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Colleges help clean up students’ online reps

At a time when jobs are hard to come by and it’s easy to dig up information that might embarrass a job candidate, some college career centers are offering tips and tools to help students put their best digital footprint forward:

* Villanova University, near Philadelphia, offers students a one-credit course on managing their online identity.

* Southern Methodist University in Dallas and the University of California-Santa Barbara addressed the issue in similar workshops last fall.

* Career centers at Syracuse (N.Y.) University and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore are offering students at no charge a Web tool, called BrandYourself.com, to help them tidy up their virtual presence.

“They are creating a brand and image, whether they realize it or not,” says Ohio State University marketing instructor Melissa Fisher.

Philosophies vary among employers about whether to check into the virtual lives of applicants. A 2009 survey by Cross-Tab Marketing Services found that 70 percent of 275 U.S. recruiters said they have rejected candidates based on information they found online.

In a survey this year of about 2,300 hiring managers by CareerBuilder — an employment and training company partly owned by Gannett, which also owns Military Times EDGE — 37 percent said they look at applicants’ social-networking sites. Of those, 12 percent said they were looking for reasons not to hire the person and 34 percent said they found information that caused them not to hire a candidate.