Friday, August 12, 2005

Have You Googled Your Students Lately?

Ah, August and articling student hiring is in the air!

The Ontario law firms have just finished our hiring of the 2006-2007 articling students (those just going into their final year of law school who will be "apprenticing" with us for 10 months after their bar admissions course...or so I believe, what with all the changes in this programme lately. But I digress...) And our 2005-2006 group of students are just about set to arrive.

It is no secret that students look to the firm websites for background information and a sense of firm culture. But what about the other way around...are firms researching the students online? With a wee bit of Googling and Yahoo!ing I was able to pull up substantial info on at least a couple students. All of it was interesting and beyond what we had been spoon-fed by the internal communications machine. None of it overly negative.

With my own proliferation on the web and past posting follies firmly in mind, I wonder about the rising incidence of teen and pre-teen blogs. At what point will these stop being cute, and start affecting students in hiring situations? And just how do you go about getting rid of old cached webpages? Finally, when will we see the rise of "planted" biographical information on the web? I mean, I've seen at least one person "adjust" his own Wikipedia bio in mocking jest.

Just a wee bit of food for thought...

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