Blogging, socialising and chatting online is not just for the Facebook generation, so executive search firms performing high profile candidate checks now need to encompass the social web.

“Reputations are no longer only made in traditional media,” says Andrew Jordan, chairman of Reputica, an online reputation tracking and reporting company. The company recently launched the ReputicaCEO Search Report, which provides a summary of all data that exists on a candidate in the public domain.

This goes beyond news reports, and provides summary data from blogs, chatrooms, usenets, trade journals and companies house, to provide a deeper “public perception” of the candidate than would be produced by a normal background check.

The report also gives a more balanced view of a candidate’s credentials, as it represents real feedback rather than official press.
“Even if these senior managers have never written a blog, or posted a comment anywhere, someone else may have written about them or their company,” says Jordan.