Think twice before you post

It no longer suffices to just dry-clean your suit for the job interview. Now, you also have to ensure your Internet history is clean, too.

The Federal Trade Commission has ruled correctly that Social Intelligence, a start-up Web company that scours the Internet for your online activities within the past seven years, can assemble the information into a report for job recruiters.

Whether you like it or not, it means anything you did online -- posting, commenting on, blogging, tweeting, or even uploading -- could influence your job prospects.

At the same time, employers should use the information with some perspective. An online life is only a small reflection of a candidate's credentials. There will often be some details found on Facebook that an employer finds disagreeable or foolish, but which may not make any real difference in the applicant's potential.

So aspiring employees should be careful. There is no "clear history" button for the Internet and those only-when-you-are-young pictures of insobriety or ill-informed rants could boomerang back at job-hunting time.

What you do online is public information, and now someone has found a way to package and market it, mostly to your detriment. So assume anything you do online will be open to scrutiny. After all, the Internet is a public square.

Everyone is guilty of making regrettable decisions. The only difference now is that they leave permanent footprints.