College students and young professionals aren’t the first to make stupid mistakes, but they are the first to post these mistakes online for all the world to see.
Gone are the golden days when you provided potential employers with carefully screened references guaranteed to give a glowing recommendation of your skills and character. Why call those people when you can look at all the things a candidate has posted online or easily figure out who else they’ve worked with and call the unscreened references?
Be forewarned that these days, most employers do some amount of due diligence on the people they hire and those they want to hire. At a minimum, they will do a Google search on you. Many will also attempt to check out your profiles on sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace.
DON’TS
Irresponsible personal behavior communicates irresponsible professional behavior to a boss. Regardless of whether you want to be a bouncer, bartender, graduate student or investment banker, good judgment is required. Poor judgment communicates all the wrong things about your decision-making skills, and companies hate bad judgment.
The key principle to keep in mind is simple: Don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your parents, neighbors, prospective employers, children/future children or anyone who’s good opinion you value to see. Here are some specific examples:
- photos of you drunk, doing body shots or passed out. Having way too much to drink conjures up images of you getting drunk at the client lunch or the firm holiday party. That’s bad enough, but having the poor judgment when you’re sober to post pictures of yourself out of control will absolutely knock you out of contention.
- pictures of you doing anything illegal. Ask Michael Phelps if you don’t think that can hurt you.
- pictures of you dressed provocatively. Always a bad idea for so many reasons.
Here are other Don`ts to keep in mind.
- Don`t delve too deeply into your religious views. Employers will worry that you will spend your work time preaching to colleagues, or worse, judging them!
- Don’t badmouth a former or current employer. It will get out.
- Don`t lie about your accomplishments. Even if you are hired, this is grounds for termination and will really hurt your future job prospects.
- Don`t boast about drinking or doing drugs.
- Don`t share confidential information about people or companies.
- Don`t have an unprofessional screen name. Names like Hotmama, CaptainKirk, Superstar1234 will close, not open professional doors.
DO`S
- Make your profiles private, but don’t make the mistake of assuming that it’s private, even if you restrict access to just your friends.
- Take down bad photos and anything else that could hurt you. Untag yourself in questionable photos. What if your BFF posted the picture on other sites and you no longer have control over your photos? There are companies that you can pay to manage your identity. They can track down all of the information about you online and arrange to have removed all the offensive information.
- Edit what your friends write on your wall or in your profile. You will be held accountable for their lunacy. Also don’t write idiotic things on your friends’ walls.
- Focus on professional interests, and safe personal interests like hobbies.
- Link to any relevant sites: company site, a blog you write
- Keep your profile current and actively manage it. This is an opportunity to define who you are to a prospective employer, much more comprehensively than possible in a resume. If a strong online presence is important for you career-wise but not something you can do on your own, there are companies that can build and manage your online profile on business
networking sites like LinkedIn. Their goal is to increase the likelihood that
you turn up on the first page of search results when someone searches
for you by name
- Sign up for a Google Alert on your name. You’ll be alerted when your name is mentioned online. It is easy for your reputation to be sabotaged. Your name could be tagged on a photo of someone naked.