We were taught as kids to not judge a book by its cover.

Well, your Facebook status just might determine whether or not you land that job you are fighting for. Websites like Facebook, Google+, Twitter or Myspace have allowed us to create our identity in a technological world.

If we don’t like who we are in reality, we can always give our profile a face-lift and update our profile picture. We are ultimately in charge of how we perceive ourselves out on the web, however, there is a fine line between professionalism and snooping around a potential employee.

Just because our profile is set to private, it does not mean we are trying to hide anything from a job we are trying to work at.  It just means we know how to distinguish between our private life and our professional life.

Whatever we do outside of the office is on our personal time. College students should think twice about posting crazy photos or public tweets like, “Who needs work? It’s thirsty Thursday! I’m getting hammered!”

Sharing our crazy happy hour moments with a TwitPic to the rest of the world might be a turn-off to our bosses, but we are off the clock.

It’s imperative to keep a positive online reputation, but according to a study by Corperate Executive Board, 66 percent of job-seekers were turned down by a potential employer because of something they learned online.

Résumés are handy and well-polished to the way we want to be known, but profiles on sites like Facebook tend to be a gray area.

As noted before, we can ultimately reinvent ourselves with our profiles. Determining employment based on the things online about us is unreliable and questionable.

If companies are checking out our Facebook profiles, will they start looking at our Match.com profiles next?

It’s ridiculous and an invasion of our privacy.

But it is better to be safe than sorry. So let’s go and clean up our online reputation before someone starts judging our sense of character by that crazy, wild photo album that is lurking around the Internet sphere.