Please consider your online presence! Which means those pictures of you doing a wet t-shirt contest should be removed on Facebook. I have a friend who has a job interview this week and she just emailed me to remove a ton of pictures I have of her up on Flickr, a social site where people look for you, too. While you may have went and made them all private, Bing and other search engines still have cached images of those photos. I had emailed her ages ago when I first posted those pictures, to let me know if anything should be removed. No response. Now, when it is already cached, she wants to do something about it. So I guess this is more like “start considering your online presence way before you apply for a job” – because some things will come back to haunt you. As a recruiter, I think it’s important to start a conversation on this topic. I also don’t suggest removing everything about you off of the channels. To me it looks odd and just looks sketchy. If I search for someone and find nothing, I know that the channels have been sanitized, and this person has something to hide. Or, even worse, they don’t realize what a powerful communication channel these channels are, and haven’t figured out how to positively leverage the “internets.”