Students: what happens when graduate employers Google your name?

Any final year students out there? Have you started getting into that tricky job hunting phase yet, when the need to find some way of earning a bit of post-university cash starts jostling for attention alongside revision and making the most of your remaining university months? It’s not that long since some of us here were there ourselves, y’know…Image may be NSFW.
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There’s always a lot of competition for graduate jobs, and temporary work can be tricky to come by too. Even opportunities that aren’t part of formal graduate training schemes are likely to see an upsurge in applicants.

That means it can be wise to come up with ideas to set yourself apart from the rest. One relatively easy option is to make use of the internet.

What does Google say about you?

Rightly or wrongly, many employers will Google the names of job applicants to see what shows up. Some jobs, especially those in the creative and web industries, will expect you to supply an online portfolio, so not having anything relevant on the web could be a real disadvantage.

Even if there’s no official requirement for this, it can’t hurt to put together an online CV to complement your paper-based one. And if it pushes any embarrassing Facebook photos further down the Google results for your name then that’s a bonus too.

Using free space

Your university may offer web space to you for free, especially if you’re pursuing a course that’s related to computers or the internet. However, this isn’t always ideal place to create a portfolio site or online CV.

For a start, the facilities on offer might be pretty basic. And if you can get round that, you might find your university deletes your account (wiping out all your efforts and any work examples you’ve added to your website) the day you leave university. Not exactly ideal if you’ve built an impressive website, put the address on your CV and told prospective employers to check it out.

Try our student hosting instead

Our student hosting service has been designed to provide an alternative to this approach. The package includes a Windows web hosting package with lots of useful features (including PHP and ASP.NET, for the technically-minded among you). It costs £1 a month, but when you sign up, you’re guaranteed the package for a whole year. We won’t bump the price up or cancel the package the minute you stop being a student.

So, if you join us on 20 March 2010, your package won’t expire till 20March 2011. And once the year’s up, you’ll be given the option to renew or cancel. You’ll certainly get plenty of notice before any of your valuable online work is in danger of being deleted.

Oh – and we’ll throw in a free .info domain name, so you can put a snappy web address on your job applications. That alone is worth £9.99 a year.

Ready to start creating your online CV, portfolio, or whatever you want to call it? Get full details of our student hosting offer here.

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