Public Image Profiling: How Others Find What About You

More frequently, BNI is being requested to conduct public image profiling - searches to uncover a subject's (or one's) personal information, that which is readily available online. Beyond verifying the usual identifiers (address, DOB, phone number...), given the proliferation of user-generated content and social and business networking sites, a potential employer or partner can often obtain an alarmingly unfiltered profile of their candidate. For obvious reasons, this information is invaluable to just about every public, private or governmental sector industry that relies on its public image to operate effectively.

We've developed several public image profiling site checklists (each containing from 45 - 102, and counting, sites) , dependent on the requestor's needs, all of which include the below basic searches:

General: Google.com, Yahoo.com(check subcategories: Web, Images, Video...)

Social Networks: .Bebo.com, Broadcaster.com, Classmates.com, Facebook.com, Friendster.com, Meetup.com, MySpace.com,Reunion.com, Tagged.com, Twitter.com, 360.yahoo.com.

Business Networks: LinkedIn.com, Plaxo.com, Spoke.com, Naymes.com.

Blogs: Technorati.com

Site Ranking: Aside from your Google PageRank, Alexa.com, is an excellent source of business information.

Again, these are the basic sites to search to form a public image profile - or research one's own Netface.

Public image profiling is the new credit report.

Stay safe,

Lina

Employee SSN Verifications and a Live Job Interview

We hope you enjoy the above job interview vid. BNI investigators have conducted numerous pre-employment screenings, and although we've had our share of interesting interviews, we take our responsibilities seriously, knowing our findings will have a direct impact on a company's operations and finances. Our first responsibility is to ensure the identity of the prospective employee. We've observed a discernable pattern among the majority of non-verifiable candidates in these situations. Those applicants requested to provide additional identification information or that were eventually disqualified for employment were initially flagged due to an incompatibility between their stated and verified Social Security Number issuance dates (e.g. a candidate declared U.S. residency as of 1997; the SSN provided had been issued in 1985).

Background checks are generally conducted utilizing progressively aggressive (and costly) methods/sources as necessary; our usual first stop is a very simple and free SSN verification site:

www.ssnvalidator.com

Be safe - know who you are hiring!

Lina