Your Public Presence

Before you write the first line of any formal application, look at what you’re communicating already. Before a recruiter reads your application, they look you up. That’s normal in remote hiring – not optional, not occasional, normal. You do exactly the same when you’re curious about anyone online. They can’t watch you walk into the building or read your body language, so they read your online surfaces instead.

What you’ll produce

An after-only display of the public-presence elements you improved this week – the polished LinkedIn headline, the cleaned summary, the account you took down. The before/after work happens in your own audit; only the improved versions go on your dashboard, because showing cleaned-up old content would undermine you. The audit is application material: every employer who Googles you now sees your Remote Readiness dashboard alongside everything else.

What recruiters are actually looking for

Not viral content. Not a manicured thought-leadership feed. Something simpler: coherent professional presence across the platforms where you show up – clarity, credibility, and basic digital hygiene.

• A current photo, an updated location, and a LinkedIn headline that says clearly what you do.
• Evidence of steady, occasional engagement that proves you’re a real working professional – not a dormant account or a synthetic profile.
• The underlying signal is attention: do you notice your own surfaces? If you haven’t paid attention to the image you present, what does that suggest about how you’ll pay attention to the work?

The two sides, and the audit method

Your presence has two sides. THERE is the deliberate impression you’ve curated – LinkedIn, portfolio, current bio. FINDABLE is the accidental one – old tagged photos, a stale bio on a dormant account, the Tumblr from 2010, the dodgy school username, the spicy comment thread from 2018. The gap between them is the work.

To see what’s findable, the way a recruiter will:

1. Log out of Google, open a private window, and search your name.
2. Ask Perplexity to summarise what it can find about you professionally – then ask it specific questions about your competence for the roles you’re targeting. Note what it surfaces and what it misses; the gaps are signals too.
3. Check the Wayback Machine for anything you’ve forgotten you published.
4. Audit your surfaces in order: LinkedIn first (headline, summary, photo, location, last activity), then the platforms recruiters reach for your field – X, GitHub, a public Substack/blog, Behance/Dribbble.

Then accentuate the professional and the positive. Remove what you can, deactivate what you can’t remove, archive the rest (screenshot anything hilarious first). The goal is one coherent story across surfaces – recognisably the same person, same expertise, same professional centre of gravity.

What “done” looks like

A strong audit ends with:

• Three specific signals you’ll strengthen or remove this week – not ten, not one.
• Each stated concretely – not “update LinkedIn headline” but the actual new headline; not “tidy my photo” but what the new photo shows.
• A direction for each – strengthening a signal, or removing a weak one. Both matter; sometimes the highest-leverage change is taking something down.

The chatbot below coaches you to this bar. It won’t accept “I’ll clean up my profile” – it’ll push for the exact change and why it matters.