Imagine a group of neatly dressed job candidates walking into a conference room. They carry with them the kind of information about themselves that it used to take a highly paid private detective to ferret out: a large collection of personal photographs, a sheaf of personal documents, a portable video player with film of their activities, and a cassette player featuring their voices. Before the interview starts, the candidates smile and lay all this material before you, and encourage you to have a good dig.

They give you pictures of their flats, their cars, and their parents. They show you a short film of them clumsily lighting a joint and setting light to their eyebrow by mistake. They play you a video from their student bands, in which they gyrate topless on stage while mouthing amusing obscenities. They reveal to you their party political affiliations, and demonstrate their cultural taste by offering you a selection of reviews they've written of contemporary film releases, current TV programmes. They provide you with a list of their favourite bands. They show you pictures of their boyfriends or girlfriends in various states of undress.

This should of course be an absurd scenario, but it's one I now see all the time. When I'm hiring a journalist I usually ask candidates for a covering letter, an up-to-date CV, and links to their work online. They usually oblige and often also include helpful links to their online identity – their Flickr, MySpace, and YouTube accounts, and a link to their own websites are not at all uncommon. What they don't seem to have appreciated is that because of the way our personal and professional identities blur online, they've also revealed quite a lot about their personal life.

For a potential employer, studying someone's digital identity in this way is a fantastic way to make more sense of whom he or she is. Reading some prose which hasn't been prepared for the particular demands of your job – a gig review, thoughts on the war in Iraq – and seeing people's photography or video or art work, can be a great way to learn more about an individual. People are great, lots of the creative stuff they do is great and certain qualities, such as education, intelligence, energy, enthusiasm, skill in writing or design or photography, can jump out at you.

At the same time, it's very clear that it was not the applicants’ intention that images of their drunken antics be top of mind during the suit-and-tie formality of a corporate interview, and you have to say that these digital natives are surprisingly casual about what they reveal about themselves. The more savvy have clearly fire-walled the information they present with their CV and show employers only a professional website. They have different places for personal and professional photography. They draw a line about what they reveal and what they offer potential employees.

I've never marked anyone down or judged a candidate harshly because of this material – but then a journalist at CNET.co.uk can afford to let it all hang out. That may not be same at the Financial Times or the BBC, or in the Civil Service. I also admire these candidates for playing around with new technology and jumping feet first on to the web – and when you play around with stuff, you make mistakes. Yet I remember how surprised I was when I was working in the US and I received job applications with photographs. This seemed to me absurd, and raised the risk that the interviewer's prejudices about someone's appearances might affect their hiring decision. I'm really not sure how to reconcile that with the fact that I now frequently see images of people before they're hired.

People need to think about what they reveal about themselves online, and make the connection that the World Wide Web is just that – a web that connects everyone, from old flames to new employers. This is clearly an issue for people leaving the open-minded world of university for the murky waters of work. If you know any twenty-something job seekers, tell them to Google themselves from the perspective of a flinty-hearted, judgemental employer, and decide for themselves whether their identity online is the one they want to present when going for a job.

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Michael Parsons, now editor of CNET.co.uk, was once European correspondent for The Red Herring magazine, and spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.co.uk

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