Check out CheckYourself™, the internet’s first automated social network reputation management tool. We'll help the job seeker find and clean up the social network messes they’ve made, before the interviewer does.
For instance, you college grads: you may have polished your resume, gotten your references and activated your job connections. So, why stop there? For a few bucks, you can CheckYourself to make sure there’s nothing in your social networks that would cause you to lose the job.
Think of CheckYourself as a home STD kit to help you identify and cure real-world consequences caused by past online transgressions.
What's the Problem?
Today, over 90% of employers use the internet to check on a job applicant. Facebook is a major concern for most people, but Twitter, Linked-In, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest and others are also easily accessible by a curious employer.
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(Source: http://visualoop.tumblr.com/post/31585793701/beware-social-profiles-can-help-you-land-or-lose-a-job)
What’s more, nearly 7 in 10 recruiters have actually rejected an applicant based on what they found on the internet! Their reasons are various, including misrepresenting qualifications, drinking, inappropriate photos, drugs, discriminatory language and even just poor communications skills.
![Trouble]()
The internet has a long memory -- remember that freshman frat party? You don’t? Not surprising, considering… but your buddies posted a picture for you.
![Double Trouble]()
Remember that trip to Daytona for Spring Break? The one where they dared you to take your top off?
![Cloudy Trouble]()
What does CheckYourself do?
CheckYourself is designed to help you find these ‘skeletons in the closet’ before their rattling scares away your future. The app will be a free downloadfrom the iTunes store and will provide you with a composite score generated from key categories such as: alcohol, drugs, sex, behavior, discrimination, profanity, defamation and politically incorrect speech. Trash talking, like tattoos, can be embarrassing years later. We don’t make judgments – we use AI technology developed for the US military to examine language, photographs and videos to show you what a prospective employer might see in a negative light. We try to give you an Interviewer’s-Eye-View of your social profile.
If CheckYourself reveals potential problems, you will be able to dig deeper to find out what comments or pictures caused the score. In many cases, users will be able to clean up their own act, by deleting offending material. Or not. If you don’t care, we don’t care.
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Sometimes, though, you'll need help. Your fame may be so widespread that you'll never be able to track these items down and separately request take-downs. Good news, you can enlist the aid of CheckYourself to request removal of the offending material. We'll provide the right letter, the right addressee and the right link & citation to ensure you the best chance of getting that stuff removed -- automagically!
Experts at Work
The technology behind all this is not simple. It requires more than just a pretty iPhone face. Underneath the covers, we are employing some very sophisticated mathematics, logic and language processing. Years of experience with US intelligence agencies, IBM, US Interactive and other major internet companies and others leads us to believe we are well suited to carry this off.
It's a lot of hard work to be done in a short period of time. But, we believe that $50,000 will be enough to get the engineering, programming, operations and artwork for version 1.0. From there, we think we can help an awful lot of young job seekers recover their 'lost years' in time for that first big job.
![Privacy Lost]()
The founders of CheckYourself believe passionately in the proposition that each of us has the right to control who sees information about us and are dedicated to creating tools to allow everyone to manager their online identity.
RISKS AND CHALLENGES
Nothing is certain. Although we think you'll agree that this is an idea whose time has come, this project carries a couple of different kinds of risk.
The first is technical risk. The world is a messy place. Software that deals with understanding human words are not foolproof (ever use Siri?) We may find that we produce results that -- though our machines flagged them as potentially offensive -- are quite innocuous. In other words, we may produce "false positives." Well, so long as we don't end up labeling your baby photos as indecent, just because you had a bit of diaper showing, we think you'll be pleased if only 2 in 10 results are actually harmful.
What about the other problem - "false negatives"? What if we miss something that might be actually harmful? We think this is less likely than the false positive problem, but it could happen. We are not saying and will probably never commit to getting it all, but whatever we do locate and you remove could make or break your professional future.
Another kind of risk is project risk. We think we can get this done in the next 4 months, but software projects are notorious for their overrunning. But, we have a combined 80 years of project management experience that gives us confidence. We are comfortable that we can develop the technology as we’ve built similar systems for government and corporate customers.
