Let me begin by telling you a story.

There once was a student in college who regularly wrote for her school’s papers (not me I swear). Outside of school she was working for Fidelity doing the job of an MBA, managing the accounts of high net-worth individuals. She was getting final round interviews at all the big banks, although she wasn’t given an offer until mid June, way after most banks had made their offers. She was hired by one of the major banks to work in England.

She moved to England at the end of the summer. But almost as soon as she had ended training, small banks began to close. Then Bear Stearns went down; Lehman followed. By the end of October her ten person team shrunk to eight, and by the end of November, their team was down to just six people. Afraid that her job was at risk, she started sending out her resume to other banks, but stopped as things appeared to stabilize.

By the end of February, banking was getting to her, and the workload of the shrunken team was more than she could handle. She began sending out resumes again. At the time, though, none of the jobs she applied for really tickled her fancy and she elected to remain in her current position.

Then, at the beginning of May, she and her project supervisor, the last two members of their team, were let go. She moved back to the US and began applying for high-level government positions working with the poor. Ultimately, her new position affords her the same amount of respect, requires the same set of skills, and makes her much happier to boot (although there was a bit of a paycut). But I digress.

Tying it all together on Google

So what sort of search activity occurred around her name whenever she sent resumes out. Well, I don’t know what happened on the internet as a whole, but I can tell you the amount of traffic that was directed to the school paper’s website from people Googling her name.

A. Corresponds to the time she was applying for jobs before graduation
B. Corresponds to her sending out resumes when the banks started to collapse
C. Corresponds to the time she sent out resumes after the stress of banking
D. Corresponds to the month that she was fired.

She had sent out resumes during four distinct periods, during which time, the search around her name increased greatly. And if you’ll notice, the Bounce Rate is 40% (this on a website whose bounce rate is up near 75% sitewide). What this tells me is that the traffic is targeted further evidenced by the fact that each visitor is visiting over 4 pages per session. The readers ARE perusing her writing. What’s more, despite the low bounce rate and the number of visited by each visitor, the average time on the site is less than 2 minutes.

Using these simple numbers we can determine a few really important things (although this is just a small snippet of one person’s search data). 1) Employers DO search your name when you apply for jobs. 2) They seem to look at a breadth of your material. And 3) they don’t spend a lot of time looking at it.

In a sense, the days of first impressions are over. Your first impression is your Google Impression. And your Google Impression may prevent you from ever getting to show off who you are in person.