5 Ways Social Media Can Cause You to Lose Your Job

By John Heaney on January 25, 2010 at 11:46 am
Featured, Interviewing, Social Media, The Search

Recent studies confirm that over half of employers check their job candidates’ social media profiles and activities before making a hiring decision. As participation across social media platforms increases it’s certain that even more employers will take the time to investigate the online persona of each potential hire before making a job offer.

1. your education doesn’t match your claims – it’s amazing how many job applicants lie about their education credentials, despite the ease with which these can be checked. And some people make it easier than ever when their Facebook or LinkedIn profile lists an education background that doesn’t match the information on their resume. If there’s any discrepancy across your profiles, it will appear as though you’re lying. Be complete and completely truthful.
2. photos of you in compromising situations – you’ve gone through the interview process, and the hiring decision comes down to you and one other candidate. You have a photo page displaying you chugging from a beer bong, passed out at a friend’s party and carousing in Cancun. The other candidate only presents circumspect shots of gatherings with family and friends, without any hint of drunkenness or out of control behavior. Which of you is the safest hire? It’s essential that you sanitize your photos, untag yourself from unsavory photos in friends’ photo albums and set up privacy constraints that restrict access to your personal photos. Examine your profile as an employer would and remove any item that could be compromising.
3. lie about qualifications – again, your online personal profiles frequently contain a wealth of information about previous jobs, dates of employment and job titles. If they don’t match the information you provided your potential employer, you’re out of contention. It’s also important to know that if you have a blog – whether personal or professional – your prospective employer will likely read that also to gauge your appropriateness for hire. And if your blog posts about your job don’t match the details you provided the potential employer, you’ll be perceived as deceptive.
4. badmouth employer or staff - the Internet is forever. Too many job seekers forget that inconvenient fact. The blog post, tweet or comment that you wrote last year blasting your former employer, revealing personal details about your boss or abusing your coworkers will never disappear. Intemperate comments will raise questions about your judgment, discretion and temperament, so be careful in your postings. When in doubt, don’t hit “Submit.”
5. discriminatory comments – any comments that you make online that can be interpreted as discriminatory, racist or sexist can eliminate you immediately from consideration. It doesn’t matter if you think you were being funny, sarcastic or ironic. Companies are risk averse, and simple won’t take the risk of hiring someone with discriminatory attitudes. Any comment you make in a public forum, like Twitter, or on your Facebook wall will be reviewed and judged so it’s best to refrain entirely from making incendiary or offensive comments.

There are ways to protect personal contact on most social media platforms. Facebook, which contains the most personal information, allows you to determine precisely who gets to view your wall posts, profile information and photos. Users can create multiple lists of friends, some who have all access permission while others have restricted access to a small subset of your online content. Learn how to manage your privacy settings, sanitize your online photos and, above all, simply tell the truth.