Proceed with Caution
I often find myself on the unpopular side of discussions relating to social networking sites such as LinkedIn MySpace and Facebook. I come from the school of thought that posting the details of one’s personal and social activities in the public domain can only cause potential harm to one‘s career prospects.
More and more, I’m reading and hearing about recruiters and hiring managers turning to the world of social networking sites to identify new talent as they quickly realize that this is a hotbed for passive job seekers. Over the course of the last little while, we have seen social networking sites adding job sections to their platforms and we have even seen companies participating in a career fair on Second Life.
It should be common knowledge that when conducting a job search or representing our current employers, we must always conduct ourselves as professionals. Unfortunately, in today’s connected world with 24/7 access to information, the line between personal and professional has blurred if not disappeared completely.
Don’t get me wrong, I do see great value in social networking sites, and in fact I harness the power of them for both personal and professional purposes. I have a profile on LinkedIn and I have just started setting up my Facebook account. In order to comment intelligently on these and other topics it’s important that I walk the talk.
There are many things that need to be considered when using these and other social networking sites and I suggest you ask yourself the following questions:
• Does my profile reflect the public image that I want to portray?
• Is there any information on my personal page that would be considered a negative to a prospective or current employer?
• Is there any information or images on my personal page that can be turned against me or come back to haunt me later in life?
• Do the connections and friends listed on my personal pages reflect positively on who I am?
Remember that all things on the Internet are forever. Simply removing information from your profile page may not be enough to keep the information out of the public eye. This is proven by simply doing a search on Google and requesting the ‘cached page’. Even if the page no longer exists, a copy of it is often times still accessible thanks to Google’s sophisticated indexing technology.
For the employer perspective, be sure to watch the videos on the topic of “Social Networking” in our video library.
Tags: Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, MySpace, Social Networking, Virtual Career Fair
