- Time and again we have been warned to be careful about what we post on social media.
- This is particularly true if one is looking for a new job or in the process of making a career change.
- Well, it seems as if the following 8 job seekers didn’t get the memo about cleaning up their social media before they went on the job hunt.
- Keep reading to find out what happened next to these 8 career movers.
Social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram can be both a blessing and a curse.
While we have lauded the blessing part of social media since its inception, we have now come to a point where we recognize the cursed aspects of social media.
From posts that shame people, to other postings designed to divide people, social media is currently in a place of contention.
Some of that contention has seeped into the job market in which employers have begun to analyze job applicants’ social media posts.
Of course one would think that if they wanted a job these days, they would make a concerted effort to clean up their social media of any controversial posts.
However, at the same time there are those who don’t give a second thought to how their posts could affect their personal careers, or, if searching for employment, their job search.
To say the least, the following 8 job candidates found out the hard way how their social media posts could impede if not completely dismantle their job search.
Taken directly from an article that appeared on The Muse.com, these 8 job seekers’ made the type of social media posts that you, quite frankly, should avoid.
1. When a Candidate Was Arguing Aggressively
Shawn Breyer and his team at Breyer Home Buyers in Georgia were doing a final round of vetting. A promising candidate had reached the end of the interview process for a transaction coordinator role, in which they’d handle things like paperwork, scheduling, and coordinating among sellers, lawyers, lenders, title companies, and more.
That’s when the team found Facebook posts (on the candidate’s public account) that made Breyer and his colleagues hesitate. The candidate was posting political content—which during a presidential campaign wasn’t unusual and wasn’t in itself an issue. But they were also arguing animatedly and aggressively with anyone who disagreed.
“We viewed this as this individual would struggle if someone on the team wanted to take a project a different direction than they had in mind,” Breyer says. “We want our team members to be able to set aside their differences and work together and we felt that these actions showed that they wouldn’t be able to perform this way consistently.”
The candidate, who Breyer says otherwise was likely to get hired, didn’t get the job.
2. When a Candidate Lied About Her Mom Dying
Rich Franklin is the founder and president of KBC Staffing, a staffing and recruiting agency in the Bay Area, so he’s seen his fair share of social media snafus over the years.
There was the time a candidate for an administrative assistant role called to cancel her interview at the last minute. Her mother had died, she told them. So of course they understood and had no problem rescheduling. Soon afterward, she emailed again to say she needed a bit more time. No problem, Franklin and his KBC staff decided.
But then someone thought to look her up and found her Facebook profile, featuring a picture of her out to dinner with her mother the day after she’d supposedly died. They sent her a screenshot and never heard from her again.
The lesson here according to Stav Ziv, the article’s writer, is to make certain your representation on social media doesn’t contradict the story you’re telling in your application. For example, don’t go on and on about how you love working on a team in your interview and post everywhere about how you think people are the worst.
3. When a Candidate Wore a Swastika in His Profile Pic
Another time, Franklin and his team were hiring for short-term construction projects. “A man had completed his interviews and was all set to be hired,” he recalls. “We found him on Facebook and his profile was locked down. That wasn’t a problem for us but we decided to click his profile picture anyway. There was our candidate wearing a biker jacket with a swastika.”
As they did with the woman who lied about her mother dying, Franklin’s staff sent the man a screenshot of what they’d found and got no response. “He had the right background and right skills,” Franklin says. “He was definitely going to get the job.” But the swastika did him in.
4. When a Candidate for a Daycare Job Posted Memes from Subreddit /ChildrenFallingOver
Franklin’s agency was hiring for jobs at a new daycare. In this scenario, the background checks needed to be more thorough than for some other projects and the agency outsourced the work. The candidate in question had a Twitter account—it wasn’t in her name but it linked to another profile that was hers and subsequently featured reposts from a Subreddit site called ChildrenFallingOver.
Although the posts were a few years old, and though “I don’t think it was anything malicious, we didn’t want to take the risk,” Franklin explains. “We didn’t want anyone who had made fun of children to be at the daycare,” he adds. “If somebody else saw this, like one of the parents, it just would be not a good look for the company.”
5. When a Candidate Was Really Angry (and Cursing) About Sports
In a competitive job search, you want to do everything you can to set yourself apart from any other equally qualified candidates. We generally talk about that truism in terms of the positive ways you can prove you’re even just a smidge better than the other applicants. But it also means avoiding something that will make you seem like a riskier hire than another finalist.
Jill Pante, director of the University of Delaware Lerner Career Services Center, led a search committee that was trying to make a final decision between two very strong candidates, who were “equal in skill, passion, and overall fit for the office.”
One candidate didn’t have much of a LinkedIn presence, which was somewhat concerning in a role where he’d have to teach and set an example for students looking to enter the professional world. That might not have tilted the scales so much in itself, but that same candidate’s Facebook profile was also full of anger and expletives in posts about how sports teams he followed were performing.
It was “F this person, F that guy,” but spelled out and sometimes in all caps, and not just in a post or two, Pante says. People are passionate about sports, sure, but there were at least half a dozen of these posts dominating his feed. “I would say all but one of us found it kind of shocking. It was the thing that sort of moved the needle in the other candidate’s direction,” Pante says. Plus, the other candidate’s profiles were “free from any F-bombs or controversial posts.”
6. When a Candidate Expressed a View Antithetical to the Company’s Values
Cristian Rennella, the co-founder and CEO of elMejorTrato.com—a search engine for loans and other financial products with a presence in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and several other countries—was looking for a new CTO.
Finding someone with the requisite technical skills was a challenge, but they had at least one promising candidate. When they took a look at his social media history, they found a tweet in which the candidate stated that having a university degree is a requirement to get a job as a programmer.
“This goes clearly against the culture of the company, where we consider that someone should not be qualified by their titles or by the lack thereof, but for [their] true ability to write code,” Rennella says. “The challenges are going to change and if the team has people who are flexible and can adapt to new changes on their own, then we have more chances of success in the long term.”
They told the candidate about the disconnect between his stated view and the philosophy of the company, where many programmers do not, in fact, have university degrees. “We respect his opinion but we do not share it. And we thought it would not be the best place to work for him.”
7. When a Candidate Posted Troubling Sketches
In one of his previous roles, recruiter Matt Dodgson (currently a director at Market Recruitment) was working on hiring for an advertising account manager position, a job that would require interacting with clients and coordinating with various teams. While researching one of the candidates, Dodgson found a Tumblr site he published under “an artsy pen name.” Still, the candidate would often link to it from his Facebook page with posts like “I just crafted this masterpiece, check it out!”
“The site, it turns out, is a collection of doodles he makes exclusively while at work,” Dodgson says. But that wasn’t actually the problem. Lots of people doodle on the job, and it’s been shown to improve focus. But his drawings were “usually mocking or making derogatory comments at particular people, including clients,” and featured “fat-shaming and sexist remarks,” Dodgson says. “If this is how the candidate thought about women in doodles, how might he interact with women at work?”
This candidate didn’t have the job in the bag; there were some other concerns, including answers to interview questions and reference calls that couldn’t quite confirm his track record as a team player. Even so, one of Dodgson’s colleagues gave him a call to give him a chance to explain his side of the story. “Ultimately, when he did not get the role, we told him that the selected candidate had strong client experience (which was true),” Dodgson says. But the sketches certainly didn’t help.
8. When an Almost-Intern Posted About His Plans to Party All Summer
We should all remember that just because we’ve already gotten an offer doesn’t necessarily mean we can post anything we want with impunity.
Regina Moravek, an HR expert who used to work as a university career services director, recalls a college junior who landed a summer internship in HR.
“In his post to share his good news about getting/accepting the offer, he added something about being excited to ‘party all summer during his upcoming summer internship,’” Moravek says. The company, which not surprisingly found the post, was so displeased that it rescinded its offer.
Conclusion
Without a doubt, social media has its pluses. People stay in touch via social media, share ideas and generally make friends and relationships.
But while not all posts are beneficial in a social media setting, others can be downright distressing and potentially dangerous, at least to employers.
As you prepare for your next job search, do yourself a favor and be mindful of what you have and are about to post. You wouldn’t want to destroy your chances for a good job because of an errant, flippant or arrogant post, so don’t make it harder on yourself.
Comb through your social media accounts as though you were the hiring manager you spoke with or that boss hiring for their team.
Objectively ask yourself based on what you read if you would hire you? If the answer is no, ask yourself why, and decide whether you should stand by your posts at the potential cost of a job offer, or the other way around.
Whatever your decision is, make sure it’s a decision you can live with in the long run.
