Remember the YouTube video your, um, friend posted on your behalf? The one where you were dancing the Macarena in combat boots and a pink tutu that belonged to your little sister?

Do ya’ really think IBM’s gonna be impressed when they see it? Not so much.

Before you go job shopping, Google yourself and see what lurks in your virtual closet. As simple as that sounds, a study conducted by ExecuNet, the executive career and business networking organization showed almost a quarter of executives have never done it. “For better or worse, the Internet provides recruiters and employers with a wealth of unfiltered information that’s used to evaluate candidates,” says Dave Opton, CEO and Founder of ExecuNet. “From a candidate’s perspective, there’s no question that managing your reputation online is as important as it is offline.” Their 2007 survey of over one hundred thirty independent and corporate recruiters revealed that over eighty percent use search engines to learn more about job candidates, and over forty percent have rejected people based on what they found.

Blog posts, Web comments about prior employers, book or movie reviews, photo or video posts, revealing memberships and unseemly nicknames or email addresses (e.g. [email protected]) all contribute to a prospective employer’s decision about whether to hire you.

You might want to also take a look at the quantity of your online posts. If you’re a prolific blogger with a full time job that doesn’t pay you to blog, a prospective boss might wonder whether you’ll be blogging on company time.

In any event, you need to know what’s out there so you can start planning your excuses, er, strategy for deflecting them.