As soon as I know I am scheduled for a meeting I do a search on the people that I am meeting. I’ve been doing this for years. But these days, I am finding much more information – personal, professional and social. There are Facebook accounts and pages, blogs, Twitter accounts, articles, pictures, movies and even LinkedIn recommendations. It’s a jumble – but if you let it wash over you, it’s amazing the kind of image that can be built up relatively quickly. For example, here’s what I found when I did a vanity search on visual search engine Spezify.
But does this sort of thing impact the way that others see us? In particular, does it impact our careers in a positive or negative way? And would you take steps, as Jye Smith recently did, to erase the past?
Forbes writer, Kashmir Hill shares an interesting report from social profile management company Reppler. The results from interviewing 300 recruiters tell an interesting story – 91% of those surveyed use social networks to screen candidates – and 69% claim to have rejected a candidate based on what they found.
On the upside, 68% have hired a candidate because of what they found on social networking sites. So clearly, it’s a double edged sword.
But like everything to do with “social media” – hiring processes show that we are really just doing the same thing in a different medium. As Kashmir explains, at the end of the day:
It boils down to demonstrated creativity, well-roundedness, and the ability not to tell lies about their educational and professional qualifications. Surprisingly, no one said “Because they looked really hot in their profile photos.”
The bottom line is, the more information we can gather from the candidate the better. Nowadays, one of the best ways to do this is via social media. I’m not sure if employers regularly use this to gather information formally but it seems that many people do. Now no one wants to be hiring the wrong person. We would like to be right the first time as much as possible.
Any employer hiring a social media professional (ha, I like the way that sounds) would be nuts not to look at whatever they can find on the web about their candidate. Employers would be mad not to have a look for any hire. If it were your business, of course you want to know as much about the person as possible so yo know you’re making the right investment. Some may argue you should be able to voice your opinions regardless of what others may think…but you’d be naive to think it doesn’t matter to others. If you wouldn’t want your mum to read it about you online, don’t post it.
“…Surprisingly, no one said “Because they looked really hot in their profile photos.”…”
This just shows that recruiters are politically correct people! 🙂