Finding out about people in the professional arena means a great deal. If your own a company or you are a hiring manager, you’ll want to look at someone’s resume. You might also interview them and call previous employers that the candidate gave as references.
Next, you might use a background check company to learn more about this candidate. You might learn some aspects of their past and present by checking public records. You can find out about their criminal history, and whether they’ve said or done anything on social media that’s a red flag for you.
Having a background check company do a popular name search to see if this candidate comes up can also tell you something about them. We’ll talk a little more about what popular name searches can do for both job candidates and companies in the following article.
Why Might a Company Do a Popular Name Search for a Prospective Employee?
Common names that people are looking for might reveal something about a job candidate that you didn’t previously know. If you’re a hiring manager and have to interview many people for open jobs, you might have many interviews every week. The bigger the company, the more interviews you may have to do, and the more candidates you will see.
In this scenario, having a background check company standing by is not uncommon. You might even have one on retainer the same way certain companies have lawyers on retainer if they regularly need lots of legal work.
You can contact the background check company to look into someone before moving any further in the hiring process. By doing so, you can sometimes weed out individuals who don’t fit the company’s standards. You might find out this person has a troubling history, and you don’t want them representing your company because of that.
More frequently these days, companies in this position also do a popular name search at the same time they do a background check. Popular name searches do just what the term suggests. They identify trending names. If a company looks for a name and sees this candidate trending, that immediately tells them something about this person.
Essentially, a company uses the best site for background checks they can find out that other business entities want to know about this same individual. This trending name search can reveal that other companies want this person too, or they’re at least looking into them.
Bidding Wars
No company operates in a vacuum. You’re going to have competitors, regardless of what products you make or services you offer. Rarely, you might have a company that has no competition, but that’s seldom a condition that lasts for long. Other challengers will emerge and try to take the crown.
Because of this, a company will need to develop better products and services. They will need to dominate the market share and even corner the market if they can. They’ll need their R and D team to develop new products, and they’ll need effective marketing to tell potential customers what they have available.
They’ll also need the best possible employees, and that’s where background checks and popular name searches come in. When a hiring manager or company owner uses them in tandem, they can first identify any inappropriate candidates with the background search. Then, they can use the popular name search to see if this is a hot candidate.
A much sought-after candidate is like a highly touted football draft prospect. They might have some buzz around them because they used to work for a company within that same industry, but now, they’re a free agent, so to speak. They might leave a former job because they’re hunting for more money, more recognition, or a better benefits package.
As someone in charge of hiring, you can use the interview, background check, resume, or popular name search to learn as much as you can about this candidate. None of these factors alone might convince you to hire this person or reveal their potential value to you. They each help to paint a more complete picture, though, which is part of why popular name searches for professional reasons are more common these days than ever before.
If you know through a popular name search that many companies have looked into this potential employee, that might raise their esteem in your eyes. You may have to bid more for their services by offering them a higher starting salary. You might offer them a 401K program, stock options, a company car, gym membership, or anything else you think will lure them away from competing businesses that want them.
More Searches Indicate More Popularity
It’s easy to see that someone who gets more searches is potentially a more valuable job candidate. If you find there’s a swarm of activity around them, you’ll know to move them up the list.
However, you should also approach the situation cautiously. While a popular name search might show that many companies want this candidate to join their organization, maybe there’s activity around that name for different reasons.
Perhaps this candidate did something illegal or morally questionable. Law enforcement agencies could be behind a candidate’s name suddenly becoming popular. Maybe these agencies suspect the person did something wrong, and they’re checking up on them.
Maybe this person has some controversial opinions, and people searching for them indicate that. The fact that many people searched for them recently can have negative connotations just as much as positive ones.
Again, that’s why you need to look at popular name searches as part of the picture instead of the whole. You might find out this person has captured widespread attention through one of these searches. As someone trying to find the best candidates for positions within your company, you owe it to yourself to find out more about this person before you pull the trigger and offer them a job.
What Should You Know About Popular Name Searches as a Job Candidate?
Of course, as a job candidate, you should know about this tool that a company might potentially use to find out about you. Just like your resume, what you say in the interview, and other factors, you need to attempt to control this narrative as much as possible.
With a background check, you can’t hide your criminal history or anything else that’s public record. A potential employer will probably find out about that as they do their due diligence. If you made mistakes in the past, you should know you may have to talk about them. You might say that you’ve changed your ways if something you did or said many years ago does not reflect your current self.
You can also control what you say or do on social media. What you post reveals a lot about you, and sometimes, social media activity can disqualify you from a job. That happens more often as this young century progresses.
As for popular name searches, you can’t control how much people look for you, but you might actually manipulate this tool to get a company to hire you, or at least to consider you more seriously. Popularity makes you more intriguing to a hiring manager or whoever else tries to learn about you.
You can perform well in the interview or hand over a sparkling resume, but a popular name search is much more intangible. If people look for you, you’re getting attention, which might make you a more intriguing candidate than the next faceless person who interviews right behind you.
With that in mind, you can try to generate interest in yourself leading up to a job hunt. Try to do anything you can to get people to search for your name, as long as you only take helpful and positive actions.
If you can get more people to look for you, that can interest companies to the point where you might get a job over someone with equal qualifications. You can game the system in some instances, and there’s nothing morally or ethically wrong about doing so.
Popularity Can Help or Hurt
In the professional arena, popularity can help you land a job, but it can just as easily lose one for you if people look for your name for some negative reason. In 2022, there’s more information out there about you than ever before. You must do all you can to appear as attractive and well-rounded of a job candidate as possible.
A popular name search that shows no one looked for you recently might not hurt your chances of getting a job, but look at it from the company’s viewpoint. If you don’t stand out in any particular way, name interest might at least get your foot in the door and get the company decision-makers to look at you differently.
If you can successfully manipulate your popularity, you might land a job you’d otherwise lose. Getting people to look for your name can sometimes give you a much-needed professional boost.
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