If you’re job hunting and have been circulating your CV, you better take extra precautions when interacting on Facebook as your prospective employer could be checking out your profile. It’s common knowledge that Facebook is in a completely different galaxy from Vegas, because what happens on Facebook does not stay on Facebook.
Depending on what’s cooking in your life at present, your content could even go viral on you, depending on it scandal-o-meter reading – which is great if you’re a rock star or media company but disastrous if it spells social suicide for your job prospects. Here are a couple of things you definitely do not want to be doing on Facebook when you’ve circulated your CV… or quite possibly ever!
Facebook Protocol For Job-Seekers
Make sure your online profile is pristine or turn up to privacy settings to “super anti-snoop” mode to make sure you not presenting an unsavory image by doing the following:
1. Vulgarity & Profanity
A definite no-no if you’re looking for work as this may leave a nasty impression in a prudish HR manager’s mouth, whose desk your CV’s just landed on.
2. Racist, Sexist & Discriminatory Remarks
Being politically correct is an absolute must these days: not only when job-hunting. No one wants to employ a bigot who’ll rub up clients and staff the wrong way. Besides, that sort of thing is so last century and went out of fashion with apartheid.
3. Unsavory pictures
Turn up your privacy settings to prevent possible employers being exposed to that image of you passed out and spread-eagled on the dance floor, with a male-stripper suggestively posed over your face, at your best friend’s bachelorette party last spring. Remove or un-tag yourself from pictures any lewd images of yourself.
4. Friends’ Then Funny but Now Dangerous Chirps
What may have been funny between your mates may be off-putting to a prospective employer who may misinterpret a comment one of your friend’s made about you on your wall. Look at your wall and newsfeeds and clean up whatever needs the once-over.
5. Games and Apps
Your apps and the games you engage in say a lot about you and how you spend your time online. Some games send updates to your timeline every time you play and if your wall is a Castle Age questing saga, clean that up fast as the a future boss may think that this is what you’ll be doing all day instead of his work, if he employs you.
6. Radical Associations & Causes
Your personal feelings about government’s need to legalize cannabis or membership to the Flat World Society may very pertinent and qualified to you, but at this moment in time the odds are weighed impossibly against such views being regarded as sane or socially acceptable by the greater public so best to keep this sort of thing on the “down-low” as well.
It’s wise to apply these tips to any social network profiles you have and just to be sure, do a Google search on yourself to see what comes up.