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More Warnings Against Oversharing on MySpace
Skapare writes "Your next prospective employer might be watching your MySpace page, according to a story at the New York Times. And if you think Facebook is more private, maybe not if that prospective employer has an intern from the same school checking up on you." From the article: "Students may not know when they have been passed up for an interview or a job offer because of something a recruiter saw on the Internet. But more than a dozen college career counselors said recruiters had been telling them since last fall about incidents in which students' online writing or photographs had raised serious questions about their judgment, eliminating them as job candidates."
While it's not much a surprise that employers would do some unconventional background checking, the article seems to make it seem increasingly prevalent. Unless you are completely in an online pseudonym, don't portray yourself in a manner online that you wouldn't want seen in real life. As far as a Google search is concerned, I can't find much with just a straight name search. My only online profile would be a Facebook listing where nothing is risque.
I'm an intern at a software development firm and when looking for another intern, my employer asked me to look the person up on Facebook - so this is a very real issue.
But I did not know the person, nor did anyone I knew, so it had no effect on the hiring of them.
A blog full of half-literate paeans to partying does suggest that you are overeducated and perhaps incompetent.
Smart people often break taboos: Richard Feynman loved strip clubs and Paul Erdös took amphetamines, to name but a couple.
Agreed. In reading many of the postings on this topic, I'm surprised at how many people are missing the point of what's going on. 25 years ago, your employers, your supervisors, and your parents spent as much time in a drug, alcohol, and sex-induced stupor as today's college students. College recruiters absolutely do not care about such matters, unless company policy requires a drug test. Your private life is your private life, because they remember they were every bit as bad in their own college days.
What is bothering them is that today's students are violating a strict social/corporate taboo - they are deliberately advertising their private lives to the entire world. When a potential competitor or customer can do a quick web search and find photographs of an employee at an S&M gangbang, that's a huge source of potential embarrassment to the company. Companies will instead hire the S&M gangbanger who had the good sense not to post pictures of his/her latest party for the entire universe to see.
People using MySpace and Facebook need to apply an old time-honored litmus test: "Would I feel comfortable if my family / relatives / minister saw this?" By all means have fun so you can swap those wild college-day stories with your co-workers ten or twenty years from now. But never put yourself in a situation where some crazy co-worker will be able to anonymously embarrass you by forwarding online photographs of something you did years earlier.
No one should be suprised this is happening. The job market is tough and HR will use anything they can to weed out the freaks. The hiring process isnt free, and every loser they deal with costs the company money.
Not saying you are a loser beacuse you have a stupid webpage, but its not worth the risk if you have stupid stuff posted up there.
And if you think that is invasive, wait until you get a 'security clearance audit'.. Then they come to your house personally..
---- Booth was a patriot ----