Andy is of course correct which is why you are better off chatting on sites like this and Wilmott.com where you can choose to use a handle that is nowhere near your name.
It is of course trivial to create an online persona that makes you look smart, responsible, kind to animals, and trustworthy. There are now firms that offer to do that for you...
Google has serious issues. If you search my name today you will find a mildly confusing mix of headhunting stuff and programming, for some time the top result was a technical article on the relationship between read-only and constness in
C++
I fear I may be setting a bad example in some of my postings, here and elsewhere. I am a director of both companies I work for, and know that I won't ever be looking for an employee job ever again. Also, I decided years ago to tell it like I see it.
That's partly my own arrogance, but also a decision in my personal branding. What works for me is the idea that people I've never met see what I write and understand that unlike many recruiters in my line of work I will be straight with them. Not everyone likes this of course, but the average is pretty good.
But that would be an insane position for most employees of large companies to take.
Bank HR are deeply paranoid about big law suits coming from online comments by staff. If you sound like the sort of person who will say "we sold this toxic shit to some dumb ***** and her towel head friends LOL" in a public forum you can incur liability on a gothic scale.
To calibrate this issue properly, you need to understand how few facts an employer really has about you.
Interviews are highly artificial, and the chances of getting any useful info out references from former employers or educators are pretty low.
How do you test for honesty ?
Is this person reliable ?
Do they have things in their personal lives that will impact work ?
Some employers genuinely do ask at interview "are you an honest person". Although this seems naive, one might as well ask, more than one banks has used handwriting analysis.
In many places the questions that allow employers to check this are illegal, and all by themselves open the doors to expensive legal action.
That's why faint, ambiguous signals may be hugely amplified. Any bullshit on your CV is a potential liability. Your ability to Ski is not relevant to algorithmic trading(*) but exaggerating it can fatally affect your application. I know for a fact that some people have failed on false "interests and hobbies".
Google has real issues, there are hundreds of "Dominic Connor"' 's most are paedophile, since of course mine is a name popular amongst Catholic priests. As Anthony says, you need to google yourself. Nowadays the first page of hits is mostly me, it is necessarily the case that for most people the first hits aren't them.
A smarter HR will add your university and/or employer to the filter and probably hit you, but names come in waves of popularity, so even in a mid sized university there may be namesakes even if your name is not very common.
I must think through what you do about that...
(*) actually when I think about what some hiring managers have told me, it does.
