Be careful what you reveal in your public online profiles. Posting to your Facebook profile about your trip with friends to a Nevada brothel or smoking enough weed to leave you with a week-long case of the munchies isn't going to be career suicide if you limit profile access to your college buddies, but it will be a monumental mistake if you're using it as a business networking tool.

As a hiring manager, I Google all prospective hires to see if they have any information listed in online profiles that will give me a greater insight into their personality. In addition, we monitor for any times when our brand is mentioned online. If you identify yourself as an AccuQuote employee within one of your profiles, and then post something that could be severely detrimental to our brand, we're going to have an interesting conversation. We're not alone, as more and more companies have the same monitoring process. Also, if you're connected through social media sites with other people at your company or within the interactive community in general, think twice before posting anything that will take away from generating business for you in the future.

As a company, you do not want people working for you to sabotage their own reputations because it also affects your reputation as a company. With more and more companies using this information in their hiring decisions, revealing the wrong information online can seriously hinder your employability factor.

I realize that the ways to ruin your industry reputation I have illustrated just scratch the surface, so I encourage you to share your stories within the comments section below in an effort to steer people in the right direction and avoid major career pitfalls.

Sean Cheyney is the VP of marketing and business development for AccuQuote.