Almost everyone these days has an account on some social media website, whether it be Facebook or Twitter. Most of us don’t think twice about sharing information with our friends, including pictures from parties and comments about our lives.
But our friends are not the only people we’re sharing with when we do that. Employers, landlords, and – eventually – historians are all too likely to peruse through the treasure trove that is the Internet. That’s why it’s crucial that you exercise discretion online, and carefully consider how you want to present yourself to the world – because that’s exactly what you’re doing.
According to a poll conducted by Harris Interactive for CareerBuilder.com in 2009, 45 percent of employers reported that they searched social `networking sites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn when researching prospective job candidates. Applicants were rejected based on their Internet activities for a host of reasons. Some of the most common included:
– Candidate posted provocative or inappropriate photographs or information – 53 percent
– Candidate posted content about them drinking or using drugs – 44 percent
– Candidate showed poor communication skills – 29 percent
– Candidate made discriminatory comments – 26 percent
There are two big mistakes that some people make when considering what to release on the Internet. The first is to assume that you are only sharing with “friends.” That notion should have been dispelled long ago by the frequent controversies over the access to personal information that Facebook gives to third-party websites. Yet some people either do not know how to navigate privacy settings, or simply don’t think about it.
Even if you do have strict controls on privacy settings, though, others can still find out plenty about you through your friends’ pages, which may not be as secure. The only way you can be sure that people won’t see something you don’t want them to see is not to post it.
The other mistake people make involves not considering the effects of time. You may be a freewheeling 21-year-old right now, and sharing pictures of you hitting the beer bong with your friends might be cool. But you may someday want to apply for a high-paying corporate job – and when you do, those pictures will still be floating around.
It may have been 20 years ago, and you may not drink at all anymore. But your potential employer won’t know that. All they’ll see is someone who is proud to be dangerously drunk. Time, on the Internet, is somewhat distorted. When you do a Google search, the first items that appear are almost never the most recent – instead they’re the sites that have gotten the most visits. Oddly enough, older links often make the top of the list, simply because they’ve had time to acquire more visitors.
Comments and blog posts can also be troublesome for you, if they’re not carefully written. If you constantly spell things incorrectly, it’s going to be a major turnoff for many employers. Even worse is if you phrase a sentence in a way that may be interpreted as offensive.
Along with the freedom that the online world gives us to criticize (or even insult) things we don’t like, we also have a self-interested responsibility to exercise caution about how we speak. The fact is, other people are looking at it.
