You’re Not Alone Out There

I was recently “friended” on Facebook by an adult friend of the family. It was immediately strange to see a fifty-year-old’s updated status next to that of some guy I had a class with, and all of a sudden Facebook felt very weird.

Then it hit me: I have pictures of my 21st birthday on Facebook that my peers would find funny, normal, even demure and “lame.” But my parents’ friend, who was now my buddy, might take pause upon seeing me take to the bottle openly, 21st birthday or not.

While this scenario might cause some awkward social exchanges, there is a good lesson to be learned from it in the realm of the job search. If your Facebook or MySpace profiles are public, your potential boss and co-workers can learn a lot about you from them. This can work for or against you, but as I am pretty sure you don’t post pictures of yourself running a soup kitchen on Friday nights, the latter is most likely to be the case.

If You Wouldn’t Tell Your Boss, Don’t Put It In Your Public Profile

We associate Facebook with twenty-somethings and school-aged people, or people who wish they were young enough to be in school, and we all use them with this in mind (and no wonder, since Facebook got its start exclusively at the university level). This is all dandy, except that these social networking sites function to blur the line between the public and private realm. The upside is that everyone has a place and voice on the internet as well as unprecedented networking potential. The downside is that you can lose control of your internet reputation, or webutation, or inter-rep, if you will.

But there are things you can do to keep your interwebutation safe. While we all might untag pictures on Facebook where we look a bit plump or because the camera caught us mid-chew, it is also advisable to edit down the albums full of overzealous partying, or doing anything of questionable moral integrity, if you are into those sorts of pastimes.

Things you say and groups with which you affiliate on social networking sites can be similarly incriminating. For example: you might love to quote Lil’ Jon’s “Get Low,” but your potential boss might find the lyrics contrary to the wholesome image your put forth at an interview. Similarly, joining groups like “Plastic Beer Pong Cups Are More Important Than Friends” (it exists) might lead someone to think your ability to prioritize is slightly compromised. And since everyone is so Google-able with their blogs and internet-published opinions and so forth, you might want to be careful you don’t offend anyone with your web-rants.

Use Your Online Presence To Help You

That said, something like a blog can be beneficial if you use it to showcase your interests, your knack for clear and concise copy, and maybe throw your impressive resume in there. The same can be said of a Facebook or MySpace profile, both of which have spaces for educational background and work experience.

You can even become a contact to potential employers on a site like LinkedIn, which is specifically for business networking. LinkedIn can really only make you look good, since it allows co-workers and bosses to recommend you, and there are absolutely no places for your friends to write you snarky comments or tag pictures of you. But even here, you have to be careful not to be annoying with too many braggy job descriptions and skills.

In a perfect world, a rational observer would be able to put a young person’s social life in its appropriate context, so long as it did not affect their work ethic, and perhaps this is the case more often than we are aware. But (and this is a really big but!) there is also the possibility that a rational person might think an applicant who does not carefully proof their internet presence is a tad careless, at best. And that’s something you can’t afford when even Starbucks isn’t hiring.

Tags: internet, work

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