Creating a consistent professional image

One of the more damaging things you can do in your job search is to send mixed signals. If you write one thing in your CV but contradict yourself at interview, you’re going to appear unsure of yourself at best, inconsistent or too flexible with the truth at worst.

What you do online should also be consistent with what you say or write offline. Here are four pointers for maintaining a consistent image.

- Be scrupulously careful with dates and titles.
Make sure that your employment or education facts are consistent on both your CV and in online profiles, such as LinkedIn or Visual CV. If you’ve embellished the truth on your CV, it may well be discovered by a social media-savvy recruiter or hiring manager doing some candidate research.

- Use excerpts from LinkedIn recommendations on your CV as testimonials.
Adding endorsements to your CV (particularly to your Professional profile or Key Achievements sections) adds a touch of third-party objectivity to your CV.

- Consider merging your Twitter and LinkedIn updates.
Update your LinkedIn profile with all or some of your Twitter updates. (The edit profile settings on LinkedIn allow you to add your Twitter username, then choose whether to automatically update your LI profile with all your Twitter updates, or only those where you add the hashtag #in to the end of your tweet.)

This has the advantage not only of keeping your LI profile fresh with regular updates, but also of helping you send out the same information (links to your blog posts, comments on forums etc) on two different networks.

- Be careful about what you post.
An obvious point, but there’s not much – if any – real privacy online. What you post today is likely to be publicly available years into the future, so make sure your posts, comments and tweets reflect the type of professional image you want to portray.

How to manage your online reputation (my recent Guardian careers blog post) has more tips for creating a professional online image.

Photo credit: Duncanh1