If you’re hunting for work, let me ask you a question. When is the last time you googled yourself?
I’ve been thinking about job seekers and social media, lately, since Tania and I recently watched a few near misses and one job lost, yep, job lost, as the result of bad social media choices. Employers will google you, and search Twitter and Facebook, so please…..think before you post! A good review and public social media clean-up before starting a job search is a good idea, as well, just in case you don’t even know what’s lurking out there for employers to find.
We’ll be offering some more advice on this front, and more data about just how prevalent the pre-job offer social media check has become in our industry, but for now, I wanted to share this terrific article on the subject, by Jacob Davidson at Time magazine. You can link to the full article through the title, or the link at the end.
The 7 Social Media Mistakes Most Likely to Cost You a Job
Jobvite’s latest social recruiting poll shows exactly what hiring managers are looking for when they check your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts.
Your Facebook postings might win over your friends—but they could also cost you a job, a new study finds.
Recruiting platform Jobvite has released the 2014 edition of its annual Social Recruiting Survey, and the results might be disconcerting to those who tweet first and ask questions later. The data shows 93% of hiring managers will review a candidate’s social profile before making a hiring decision.
And that review matters: 55% have reconsidered a candidate based on what they find, with most (61%) of those double-takes being negative.
According to respondents, the worst thing you can do is make any kind of references to illegal drugs. That should probably be common sense—but in case it’s not, know that 83% of recruiters say doing so is a strong turn off. (Perhaps more interesting: 2% of hiring managers think it’s a positive.) Also on the “obviously don’t do this” list are “sexual posts,” which 70% of recruiters say will count against you (only 1% are fans). Two thirds told Jobvite that posts including profanity reflected poorly; over half didn’t like posts on guns, and 44% saw posts about alcohol as concerning.
“Okay,” you say, “but I keep my nose—and my posts—clean, and I wouldn’t think of making any of the 10 stupidest social media blunders MONEYrecently wrote about. So what have I got to worry about?”
Well, you might want to take another read of what you’ve written: 66% of hiring managers said they would hold poor spelling and grammar against candidates.
You might also want to consider keeping your political affiliation to yourself, since slightly over 1 in 6 recruiters said that was a potential negative.