Your credit score carries significant weight in your financial life. Want to rent an apartment or buy a car? Good luck doing so with a bad credit score. The same logic applies to landing a job if you have a negative online reputation.
Sample Career Score
So says MyWebCareer, an early stage startup that has developed algorithms to run your “Career Score,” a credit check for your professional web persona. The service analyzes your Facebook profile, LinkedIn network, Twitter account and Google juice — evaluating more than 200 different variables in the process — and spits out a score between 350 to 850.
Where you fall could be an indicator of how employable you are and indicate your overall professional attractiveness.
Once you grant MyWebCareer access to Facebook and/or LinkedIn, the service works to retrieve employment history and searches Google for references to you in any of the positions you’ve claimed to have held. The startup is also running semantic analysis on your Facebook updates, checking out your Stack Overflow profile, if you have one, and factoring in your Klout score, among other things.
The resulting score — which remains private until you opt to share it publicly — is evaluated against your peers in three areas: your connectedness, professional online brand and internet search footprint. The service will highlight potentially offending status updates and make specific recommendations for how you can improve your score.
If a search query doesn’t bring up results, for instance, relating to past jobs, MyWebCareer will call your attention to these eyebrow-raising issues.
The public beta service, only having launched in February, is far from complete. Co-founders Greg Coyle and Nip Zalavadia say they want to make the Career Score as reflective of your online reputation as possible. This means they’ll continue to add data sources — like Quora once there’s a publicly accessible API — in the future.