How Social Media can Harm your Job Search
Social media: a place where a lot of people spend a lot of time. We use these platforms to share pictures and videos, and statuses and thoughts, and we decide that these things are good representations of us.
. From a hiring perspective, social media serves as another way to assess a candidate’s suitability for a company or role – it is a window into what a person is really like in their personal life, and gives an insight into what may be left off a job application. Does the candidate share a lot or a little? Are they passionate about sport? Are they verbal about controversial topics? You can find out a lot about a person if you look them up online, and these days it doesn’t even take that long!
Allegedly, more than a third of employers in the UK have rejected a candidate based on their social media profiles. Forbes noted a few reasons for this, most commonly being that inappropriate content on the candidate’s profile displeased them, and in close second, employers admitted that it was due to evidence of alcohol or drug consumption. Other reasons included poor communication skills, bad mouthing previous employers, discriminatory comments, and lying about qualifications. Based on this rather scary figure, it can be said that there are 3 ways around this problem –
Get friendly with your privacy settings
Whether you are a Tweeter, a Facebook-er, or a bit of both, it is very useful to know your way around the privacy settings online. These pages are usually located within the account set-up section, and allow you to determine who can find you and how much of your content they can access without your direct permission. With 5 minutes and the click of a few buttons, your profile will go from an open book to a sealed vault.
Locking your profile up in this way means that you don’t have to trawl through your profiles, filtering out the unfavourable stuff. You won’t have to erase pictures you want some people to have access to, but not others (such as pictures where you and your friends may have had a few glasses of bubbly), and, plus, it can be quite a timely task!
Delete the potentially controversial/negative content
Deleting outdated or not-so-flattering content whilst keeping an open profile (no privacy settings) will show you to be an open, and respectable, book in the hiring manager’s mind. You can ‘play god’ and choose the best parts of your profiles, uploaded by yourself and others, and get rid of the less desirable content. This does, however, sort of defeat the reason that many people have social media in the first place – to share content with friends and family, whether it’s memories of your university days, thoughts about things you are passionate about or even just funny cat videos.
When social media started to seep into everyday life and become the norm, a lot of people got keyboard happy and made posts about anything and everything. If you have been a Facebook user since it became popular in 2008, especially if you were fairly young and it was so exciting, it is likely you have built up a large amount of content throughout the years – it’s worth noting that it’d probably take a while to sift through everything and delete the things that someone else might dislike seeing, rather than just closing the door on onlookers (making your profile private.
Make a professional online presence, separate to your personal one
LinkedIn is a must-have for all job seekers and professionals; it can be used for networking, spreading your name throughout your industry, finding job postings, and so many more things. This platform should, in theory, only be used in a professional capacity, like an online CV, though it is becoming more and more like Facebook everyday (to the annoyance of many professionals). If you don’t want to go for the previous suggestion for Facebook and Twitter, I would recommend implementing no.1 and then creating a second profile that people are free to browse through which contains only the material that shows you in a favourable light (pictures of you volunteering, participating in university activities, sporting events, for example). This way, snoopers can check out the professional ones, and you don’t have to delete any of your information whilst still coming across as an open book.
Everyone can agree that it’s simply not worth losing out on a potential job because the hiring manager got the wrong impression from browsing through your profiles. So, next time you post pictures of a Pinot fuelled Saturday night on Facebook, have a quick look at your privacy settings first!
In reality, these things shouldn’t be an issue, but if there is a choice between two identically qualified candidates, you may find that you aren’t chosen on the basis that the other candidate has a more professional online image. Don’t forget, you are representing a brand, and a company will only hire people that will do this appropriately and favourably.
If you are currently in the midst of a job search, and are interested to find out what roles we’re currently recruiting for, get in touch with us here at 5Q on 0203 7008483, or email caitlin@5-q.co.uk to find out more.
