Status Update: Please Hire Me Before You Fire Me
As you sit in class at 9 a.m. on Monday morning with dark circles under your eyes, clad in a sharp black blazer and polished designer boots, you might be feeling like the poster child for “Work Hard—Play Hard.” After a juggling another week of strenuous upper-level class tests and projects, you have also aced your interview for your top-choice company the Friday before and stayed up until 3 a.m. last night to perfect a group project that would have impressed Steve Jobs … Amidst all this, you might also be failing your second job interview—right now.
Employers are looking past applicants’ résumés and cover letters to their Facebook profiles. Of course you have to charm your interviewer and convince them that you would go to the end of the world to do your job right, that your biggest flaw is that you are a perfectionist and that you think that the kid in the framed picture on their desk is the cutest baby you have ever seen. If you triumph throughout this interview, you might assume that you have earned the job. Not exactly.
A study by CareerBuilder.com shows that “a little over one in every four hiring managers have used sites like Google to research employees.” New research shows that more employers are screening potential employees’ social networking sites and basing their hiring decisions about what they discover about you online. College students and recent graduates are the most frequent users of social media sites—these are also the people most aggressively hunting for jobs. According to CareerBuilder.com, “of the employers electing to research candidates on social networking sites, sixty-three percent did not hire a prospective employee based on the information uncovered about the candidate online.”
College students and recent graduates are the most frequent users of social media sites.
90 percent of college students are Facebook users, and as most any college student would tell you, Facebook is commonly maintained as a yearbook of events to document your life: it shows who you date, what your political affiliations are, which city you live in, etcetera.
“Most of the pictures I have are posted on Facebook,” said Puja Malhotra. Malhotra is a Resident Advisor at the SJSU dorms. Her employer disclosed to her (after hiring) that her Facebook page would be consistently screened throughout the school year for incriminating photos. “Incriminating photos” even included those where she was drinking from red “party” cups—even if it was merely water inside.
“My job is to be kind of like a mentor for other students. I have to be really careful about what goes on my Facebook page … my job depends on it,” said Malhotra.
For most college students, to document your experimental college years online is the reminiscent equivalent of “What Happens in Vegas, Stays on Facebook,” otherwise known as “It Sounded Like a Good Idea at the Time.” You might want to think twice about posting last weekend’s events.
The National Association of Colleges and Employers conducted a study where approximately one in ten employers interviewed said that they plan to evaluate potential employees’ information online. The employers who have admitted to assessing applicants’ profiles say
“the information available on these profiles has at least some influence on hiring decisions.”
Personal profiles contain more than just your picture and date of birth; they say even more about a person than they would be willing to admit during an interview.
In addition to hiring decisions, sometimes your Facebook habits might negitively influence your luck with house-hunting. Leahna James, 45, a landlord from Sacramento, Calif. admits that after an initial interview with a prospective renter, she checks out their Facebook pages.
“You would be surprised at the things I’ve found,” James says. James does not have a Facebook page, but she is able to access most of the pages of her applicants.
“I have found a picture of an applicant drinking a beer in the driver’s seat of a car,” James says,
“…of course I judge people by their Facebook pictures. I can’t risk somebody getting a DUI and missing a month or more’s worth of rent…”
Some things that others might not interpret correctly, or the pictures that “you had to be there” to understand, are better left un-posted.
“Why would I mention that the picture where I look like a passed out drunk was actually a picture my friend took after he tripped me and I fell into a bush in an interview?” asks stylist Jenna Bailiff, 24 of Sacramento.
“My friends are real mature,” Bailiff says, sarcastically.
“We play a lot of pranks on eachother, and document them all. It’s not really a good look…”
Media and Society professor at Sierra College in Rocklin Calif., Dr. Nicholas Zoffel analyzes social behavior in the media. He said,
“It doesn’t surprise me that employers use information they find online about a potential job applicant. If you participate in social media, you should think about things like ‘the self’ as brand. It is something to be managed; we should all manage how we are perceived.”
“We know that people smoke and drink, but we should not forget that anything you put on your Facebook is ‘endorsed by you,’” said Dr. Zoffel.
The article The Newest Way to Screen Job Applicants: A Social Networker’s Nightmare by Carly Brandenburg explores the potential dual-purpose of your Facebook site. Brandenburg wrote:
“Zuckerberg and others believe that Facebook can be private by enabling and personalizing their privacy settings, but many simply choose not to bother. A potential employer has the likely chance of being within your own network, thereby breaking through to one’s semi private profile.”
In Brandenburg’s article, she quotes Facebook Founder, Mark Zuckerberg:
“[T]he problem Facebook is solving is this one paradox. People want access to all the information around them, but they also want complete control over their own information. Those two things are at odds with each other.”
If these two issues are at odds, then a simple solution might be to separate your private life from your professional one. MySpace posed less of a threat to one’s employment, possibly because of the separate “name” and “user name” aspects that differentiate the sites. Facebook usually shows the user’s actual name, whereas MySpace had usernames like “Double080” or “LittlePanda77.” San Juan Unified School District’s Human Resources have confirmed that accompanying a general background check, noncertified employees are subject to Facebook site screens, however, MySpace-screening is “uncommon.”
Media Relations Manager Matt Kinghorn goes by this rule of thumb: “When in doubt, don’t post! Also, do not go by your real name, and do not use the same email address for your résumé as your Facebook email address… it’s Beating the System 1-0-1.”
Legal rights to Facebook privacy are currently undefined. Dr. Zoffel is not alone in his belief that our individual Facebook pages are our own individual branding sites. In the future, it might be an infringement of privacy for prospective employers to make hiring decisions based off of what is posted “privately.” Until then, post at your own risk.
Olivia Barton 