Two jobs ago, back when I had the power to hire and fire members of my team, I absolutely took a look at candidates' online presence when deciding who I wanted to invite in for face to face interviews. I'm close enough to FIRE now that I'm not worried I'd lose a chance at a dream job over a MMM forums post, but having made snap judgments about strangers on the internet, I'm absolutely aware that strangers on the internet are making snap judgments about me.
Staying anonymous in as many online arenas as I can allows me a measure of comfort in being able to be my whole self. IRL most of us play down (or outright don't mention) aspects of our lives as a sort of social lubricant. I'm lucky enough to know people across all sorts of spectrums and tend not to talk about [attribute not possessed by people I'm talking with] when socializing with [group that enjoys an aspect of my life unrelated to that attribute] mostly for simplicity sake and in some cases out of respect for the people I'm talking to.
Here on MMM forums every aspect of our lives can and may come under scrutiny on path to FIRE. I'd rather not have someone follow me here from another arena and put all the pieces together IRL. YMMV
So, silly question, how do people that google others deal with common or slightly common names? It is no longer relevant to me as I am now FIRED, but when I was working people would google my name, and my linkedin would come up, but so would info about someone that wasn't me that was in a really strange band. People would ask if it was me since there was no location of anyway to distinguish the band. Would a person hiring just assume that was also me since my name isn't particularly common?
LV
If operating it could be difficult (especially without middle name, I have a common first and last name, but not so much on the middle name). Knowing my full name you makes it easier to find some things, but makes finding names of family and associates much easier.
But a job application often contains a lot of addition information home address, phone number (unless you have a dedicated Google Voice number for job materials), email (unless you have a dedicated email for job applications), and places of education just to name a few.
For someone who doesn't carefully curate their online presence that might be enough to start to narrow the field quickly.
For example, common name person says they went to X school and were class of Y, that can narrow down social media searches. Or as a real world one I just pulled up a friend from college using name and school name and have a pretty good idea of their religious positions now (not that I didn't already know), a few pictures, and a link to their facebook.
Even limiting online presence,If you were to take my phone number and place it into google, you would be treated to a former voter registration (courtesy of public records and a company that requested them) that would give you a former home address, my age, ethnicity, political affiliation (or lack thereof). Using that old address I can quickly find the last 5 or 6 places I have lived.
Taking an old email address that I have had for 20+ years and googling it turns up a newsletter from a model club I was in as a early teenager.
Taking another old friend's long used email address, I am able to find a few forum posts (on the type of forum that posted emails in plain text back in the day) and a forum username that he apparently uses still to this day on other boards. It gives me a pretty good picture of what is politics and hobbies have become.
Uncommon names and an additional piece of information make things really easy.
