Slashdot Mirror
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."
This is great news; my Facebook site is a combination resume, cover letter, and reference letters. Hey recruiters, this way!
There are many highly qualified and intelligent people here (it's a top 20 university) with very vapid social lives.
these employers using google and myspace to research their prospective employees may as well be basing their decisions on the bible or the magic 8 ball.
There are many people who can quickly switch personalities to a work mode, many of the most intelligent are also the most eccentric as well. Passing people up because of eccentricity, quirks, or political views will harm employers in the end.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
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.
On the Internet - everybody knows that you are a perv' ...
Unfortunate postings to Slashdot are also pretty, well, unfortunate, because Slashdot has a high Google-rank, so your Slashdot postings will place highly in Google on a search for your name. I don't think you can get a Slashdot comment removed.
Bjarke Roune
In my opinion this could be as much of a good thing as it is a bad thing. Sure if you write all sorts of useless MySpace one line "lol ponies are cute!!!!" comments then yes, you may be less likely to be hired. But then again making such comments indicates that you are a fairly shallow, and possibly annoying person, and thus may not be a good person to hire. On the other hand if you are generally insightful and have useful things to say then it would seem that you would be more likely to be hired, and I can't think of that as a bad thing. So in general if you act like an idiot you are less likely to be hired, if you act like an adult you are more likely to be hired. If we feel that this is an acceptable consequence of real life behavior why shouldn't it be an acceptable consequence of online behavior?
Philosophy.
Every so often, I get an email from someone I've never heard of, asking how I've been and why I never respond to email at some other account. Turns out there's someone else with my name, of a similar age (well, plus or minus 5 years, I guess), in the same country, and studying informatics of some form (AI rather than CS). Also, he appears to be impossible to find contact details for. I'm not making this up, and unless spammers have suddenly become much more intelligent and literate (and created a specialist website to back up their story), these are quite genuine requests.
What's to guarantee that the person a company finds on Myspace or Livejournal - I don't know much about Facebook - is the same person they're actually considering employing? I'd be quite upset to find I'm suddenly employed and expected to be an expert in genetic algorithms, when my total experience with them is a couple of lectures several years ago. Names aren't unique, and sometimes there are enough similarities that I'm contacted by people who believe they know me personally.
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.
No real suprise here, it's been coming for a long time. With so many people thinking they will never be seen on the net and that only a small amount of people can reach their personal pages, smart employers will google around for them and find out a lot more about the person than they need to know and you can't blame them, that way they will find the best candidate for the job no matter what CV they are presented with or how many qualifications you have.
It may be a harsh way to do things, and some may argue that work should stay work and personal life should be private, but if you compromise yourself publically on the web - expect to reap what you sow.
Business Voyeur
What seems kinda silly is however to go to far with this. The odd thing is that those kids who do extreme things are the ones who do best in real life. I should know, I didn't as a kid and I am very mediocre in my adult life.
Who do you want in your company? Joe Average or somebody going places? For certain jobs yes somebody with a solid boring past is perhaps best. Chartered accountants would be nice to know they never ever broke any law of any kind ever. Read up on Arthur Andersen to see what happens when you go from the boring accountants to the exciting ones.
What is a problem is that people who do stuff like posting pictures of themselves smoking pot online then seem to want the kind of job that calls for people who think a cup of tea is a rollercoaster ride. There are just certain kind of proffesions where your entire life will come under close scrutiny. It doesn't matter so much as what you did but how easily it can be found out. Have an affair as president just don't let it get into the papers.
The problem is that we fear overlap. Is the guy who smoked pot in college still doing it? That doesn't really even matter, cocaine has a certain respectability. What matters, is he still stupid enough to post evidence of criminal behaviour for the entire world to see?
Women especially are truly stupid in this regard. Take your top off in front of a camera and those pictures WILL find their way onto the internet. Surely everyone knows this by now? Yes women still take their kit off and act all suprised when they end up on the net. How much are you willing to bet that if these women ever want to have a position with any importance later in life these pictures will come back to haunt them?
I bring this up because I recently had a rather weird discussion with a co-worker about this whose pictures off an art thing she did in university came up. She was full frontal in some play they did. It was art. When I asked her why none of her fellow male students were in any kind of naked state she was unable to find a reason. I noticed this before. A lot of times women in art go naked while the males telling them it is for art keep their clothes on. Odd that.
But she is now known on the workfloor not for her brains or years of good work but her perky tits. This doesn't matter if like me you got no ambition but if you want to move up who do you think they are going to choose. The guy who jerked off to naked girls or the girl that got naked?
Life ain't fair, that boss who drives his suv while drunk will not hire the kid who smoked a joint and the boss who fucks his secretary half his age will not give a promotion to a woman who got her kit off. If you got ambition, think about what you do. And while it ain't entirely fair, I am not certain I want the world to be run by people who can't think ahead. Is somebody who can't think ahead about his own future really fit to think ahead about say a companies future or even the entire country?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Imagine if a prospective employer saw your Slashdot postings!
Employer: I'm sorry but your just not the person we're looking for.
You: But why?
Employer: We saw that all your Slashdot posts were rated -1 Troll and our company doesn't need anymore trolls.
You: Damn it!
Yes a marketting job could well do with someone who stands out. For a lot of real jobs it don't matter shit. You don't care what your plumber did in school did you?
But for a lot of the more exciting/succesfull jobs who you are matters because the risk for choosing the wrong person are high.
Tell me, what kind of pilot do you want. One who leads a perfectly boring life who just spend a quiet weekend home with his wife and kids or one who just spend the weekend on a drug and booze filled rampage? Who do you want managing your stocks. Someone with all the political motivation of a jellyfish or someone who firmly believes money is the root of all evil?
Do you want an eccentric person in charge or a nuclear powerplant. A police officer with quircks, a judge with political views (especially one that doesn't agree with yours)?
Luckily most people never need to worry about this. There are plenty of jobs out there where they don't give a shit what you do in your private life. And I can't help but feel that if you want a bigger job then you should be willing to adjust what you do in your private life so you can get the big bucks.
If you want to be your own person in your personal life then the price is that you will have to accept the kind of job where your personal life don't matter. The fast majority of jobs will be open to you. Sure the fast majority of jobs also have bad pay and are boring but hey, at least you got a full and un-spyed upon private life.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Next time you're going for an interview, look up the interviewer.
You might find that the higly professional lady wearing a smart business suit spends her weekends dressed up in strange clothing and hanging around with a motorcycle gang, to pick a real example at random.
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.
Also your government:
5 56.200
""I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves." So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster are a snoop's dream.
New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals."
Full story at: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19025
Clearly many people who are creating myspace sites have a strange relationship with this very public forum. On one hand they view it and understand it as public. It is the web afterall and everyone is just a Google search away. But yet they still seem to place a psychological shield around it. So while they surely must know it is public, they still regard it as somehow very private and personal ("my space") and are shocked when people hold them accountable for the information content they advertise.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
I had a pretty wild time at University and eventually dropped out because of it. This was back in 1991, and some of my posts on Usenet were pretty telling about what I was doing in my life at the time.
Of course, at that time we were quite naive and none of us realised what the Internet would turn into.
When Google released the Usenet archives for searching I had to scamper to get all my posts (hundreds of them) removed from the archive, as my employers would probably not have been too pleased - for a week or so my name in the google search engine produced thousands of posts none of which I am proud of now.
Last year we were interviewing for a helpdesk position and one of the candidates mentioned that he'd written tools to aid posting to LiveJournal. This meant that there was a good chance he had an LJ himself so, out of interest we did some googling and found it.
In it he had written...
-That he was currently suspended from work for misuse of IT equipment.
-That his current duties were less technical than the impression he'd given in the interview.
-That he wasn't really interested in the position we were offering and would be hoping to leave within a few months.
Needless to say he didn't get the position.
His blog also went into some detail about his sexual fetishes. This wouldn't have been a reason not to employ him, but it might have made things a bit awkward in the office especially with him not knowing we knew and such.
I threw my name in Yahoo people search and it came back with 10 results, none of which included me. I've thrown my name in google and there was plenty of results, but again mostly referring to other people. There's even a myspace page by somebody else with the same name. Recruiters should be cautious to make sure that when they are investigating somebody, the information they find really is about the right person. The world is a big place and the internet is accessible from just about anywhere so it's just about guaranteed that there are other internet users with the same name as you. Now if there's photos of you on myspace, then they will know it's you. And you will deserve everything you get.
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 ----
I can agree with that 100%. I interned at a corporate office of a Coal Mining company this year, and HR department told me to help them recruit new interns. In essense, all of the resumes filtered through me first. I facebooked all of the candidates... and it just so happened that the number one candidate for the position (with a 3.91 GPA) was part of a malicious environmentalist group on campus at my school. I can give you 2 guesses to whether or not she even got the interview, but you'll only need one.
You can pretend to be somebody you're not, but by and large kids in particular are really savvy to this kind of "fronting".
So teenagers never get fooled by 40 year-old guys pretending to be seventeen?