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Many people spend a lot of time on Facebook, and in many ways, spending time on Facebook is a great social interchange between friends, family, and people you know. What is well known is that employers, potential or actual also troll your Facebook account.
This morning there was a message on Facebook that made me stop and think for a moment, should we delete our Facebook accounts when we are looking for a job?
There are a lot of reasons for doing this, and while your data is still going to be in Google Cache for a very long time (unless you ask for it to be removed) this might end up being the next “big thing” as people start trying to return to work.
Our study found 70% of surveyed HR professionals in U.S. (41% in the UK) have rejected a candidate based on online reputation information. Reputation can also have a positive effect as in the United States, 86% of HR professionals (and at least two thirds of those in the U.K. and Germany) stated that a positive online reputation influences the candidate’s application to some extent; almost half stated that it does so to a great extent. Source: Microsoft Research
While we do want to be social, there are a ton of reasons not to friend your boss, or in some cases post stuff online that reflect negatively upon you, that does not mean that people still do not pay attention to what they are posting online at all. They do, but the connection between public and private is so blurred by social networking that people are failing to make the connection that what they do privately reflects upon the ethics and morals of the HR person who is trolling Facebook (or any other service for that matter) looking at potential hires. If the HR person does not mind drunken partying – then you might be ok to that HR person.
What we have entered is the reputation economy we are who we are online, because that is what people see. For some who are job seeking that might mean pulling your Facebook profile for a while as they are going about job searching. For others it might mean that they polish up their professional contacts, recommendations on LinkedIn, and otherwise change their image to the simple portrayal of the perfect vision of the “company person”.
This is where this all gets interesting, but even more interesting when people believe that they have to dump their Facebook profile when they start the job search. If anyone else has done this, let’s talk about this here, or on your blog, ping back so I know you are discussing it. This could be an interesting discussion.
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While I do not profess to be a Human Resources nor legal expert, I would submit I have been advised by such professionals in my role as a hiring manager several times that while this practice certainly occurs, at this point and time in the US, there is a great deal of privacy and ethical issues raised by utilizing social media and even tools such as Google to screen candidates.
I think you nailed it, Dan, when you said it’s best not to say something you would regret. However, I would point you to the well known issues revolving around e-mail where context and tone are often lost in translation. Social Media perhaps might allow you to seemingly contextualize a person, but I have my doubts about this as well. In interpersonal communications, so little emphasis is placed on the actual words. Over 2/3 of the weight of a conversation comes from tone inflection and body language (if not more).
Given these dynamics and the infancy of social media platforms, is it reasonable to say we can form an accurate opinion of someone? Maybe? Maybe not?
Great read, Dan
Warmest Regards,
Ken Stewart.
I don’t think deactivating is necessary. I know many of my friends who have deleted content or restricted it to only friends as a result of looking for work.
When I was looking for work, I did the same thing – I put in a very restrictive policy on my profile even if I didn’t have anything embarrassing on there; I didn’t want anything to jeopardize a job opportunity. I knew about the Google cache so that’s how I started off when I first had a profile.
Do employers really go into google cache to look at your profile? That seems to be way too involved.