A friend of mine, a project manager with ten solid years of experience, spent three months applying for roles and heard almost nothing back. Her resume was strong, and so were her references. It wasn’t until a recruiter friend offhandedly mentioned that she’d Googled her that anything made sense.

The first page of results included a heated comment thread from 2016, in which she’d argued with a stranger about a local zoning issue. It wasn’t offensive, just sharp-tongued and a little immature. But it was the very first thing anyone saw when they searched her name.

She hadn’t thought about that thread in years. Recruiters, apparently, had been reading it every week.

Hiring Managers Search More Than You Think

Surveys of recruiters have said the same thing for years: a large share of them look up candidates online before deciding to interview them. Most won’t mention it, and most won’t tell you it influenced their decision. You simply don’t get the call.

That doesn’t mean everyone is hunting for scandals. Usually it’s a quick check to confirm you’re real, professional, and consistent with your resume. The problem is that a quick check gives disproportionate weight to whatever is most visible. One old argument can outweigh a decade of quiet competence, simply because it sits at the top of the page.

Start by Seeing What They See

Open a private browser window, so your own history doesn’t skew the results, and search your full name. Then try your name with your city, your profession, and your current or previous employer. Check the image results and, if you’re comfortable, the news tab.

Write down what you find. Don’t judge it yet, just list it. Most people discover a mix of things they expected, things they’d forgotten, and one or two surprises.

Sort Everything Into Three Piles

Once you have your list, divide it up. This step matters because the right response is different for each pile.

The first pile is content you control: your own old social posts, blogs, profiles on sites you’ve abandoned. This is the easy part. Delete what no longer reflects you, tighten privacy settings on what stays, and close accounts you’ll never use again. An afternoon of this makes a visible difference.

The second pile is content someone else controls but that’s genuinely inaccurate, outdated, or in violation of a site’s rules. Here you have options, and this is the pile where it makes sense to try to remove negative content properly: write a short, polite email to the site owner, use the platform’s reporting tools, and for certain categories of material, make a request through the search engine itself.

The third pile is accurate content you don’t like. A news article that’s factual, a public record, a fair criticism. This is the hardest category, because it usually can’t be taken down, and trying too hard tends to draw more attention to it.

For the Third Pile, Build Rather Than Erase

When you can’t get rid of something, the practical answer is to give people something better to find. Search engines like recent, relevant, well-connected pages, so a simple strategy tends to work over time.

Create or refresh a professional profile on a platform recruiters actually use. Put up a basic personal website with your name as the title, a short bio, and examples of your work. Write a few thoughtful posts about your field, or contribute to a project or publication that carries your name. None of this needs to be elaborate. It just needs to be real and consistently updated.

My friend did exactly this. She cleaned up her own accounts, asked the forum admin to delete her old comments (they agreed within a week), and spent a couple of evenings building a clean portfolio page. Within two months, the zoning thread had dropped out of the first page entirely.

Don’t Overcorrect

There’s one trap worth mentioning. After a scare like this, some people try to erase every trace of themselves online. That can backfire. A candidate with no digital footprint at all can look just as odd as one with a messy one, particularly in fields where professionals are expected to have some visible presence.

The goal isn’t invisibility. It’s a presence that fairly represents who you are today, and that gives a reader a sensible first impression in the thirty seconds they’ll spend looking.

Make It a Habit, Not a Panic

Search yourself every few months. It takes ten minutes, and it means you’ll catch anything new while it’s still small. Setting up a simple alert for your name can help too.

And try not to read too much into a single result. Most recruiters aren’t looking for perfection. They’re looking for reasons to feel comfortable, and a clean, current, professional presence gives them plenty.

My friend started getting interview requests about three weeks after that thread disappeared from page one. She got an offer by the end of the month. I’d love to say it was entirely because of the cleanup, but of course nobody can know that for sure. What she’ll tell you, though, is that she’d have preferred to find out about the problem earlier.