By Michael Klazema
Online Career Tips, Guest Contributor
It used to be that Facebook was a largely privatized network. The site could only be accessed by those with a college email address, and its uses were purely observed as the social type. Now, everything has changed. The “social” aspect of social networks is still in place, but sites like Facebook have also become a document of everything that we do online and of all the ways those actions relate back to our everyday, real-world life. For these reasons and many more, social networks have become obvious tools for hiring managers and employers looking to learn more about their applicants or workers in a quick and convenient way.
This brings us to the first of two questions posed in the title of this article: “should I repair my social image before an interview?” The answer, of course, is yes. Certainly, not all hiring managers use social media to judge whether or not their applicants are suitable for employment. Regulatory organizations like the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) frown upon social media background checks due to the way they risk revealing personal information that employers are not necessarily permitted to know (a person’s race, religion, sexual orientation, political views, etc.) and thereby threatening the possibility of equal employment.
With all of that said, though, social media background checks are not illegal, and there are many employers, educational institutions, and other recruitment bodies that do use them regularly. Since you can never quite know on which side of the social media background check argument your interviewer stands, you should always go into the interview knowing that your social image is as clean as can be. Otherwise, you might lose out on the dream job of a lifetime thanks to something that would have taken less than 20 minutes to fix.
The second part of the titular question, then, is how you can go about repairing your social image once you’ve deemed that doing so is necessary. Depending on how active you are on social media, there can be a variety of different answers to this question, but you can locate 99 percent of job-threatening content by doing the following:
- Sort through your posts: Every social media platform is built from the concept of posts. On Facebook, it’s statuses and comments; on Twitter, it’s tweets; on blogs, it’s articles; on YouTube, it’s videos. Consider every social network you use and put it on your agenda to go through each and sort through the posts. Anything with questionable content – be it profanity, offensive remarks, or statements made complaining about employers or colleagues – needs to go.
- Consider your pictures: Photos have only become a more integral part of social media over the years, moving from Myspace and Facebook profile pictures to full photo albums, and eventually paving the way for entire social networks (Instagram, for instance) based around visual postings. While cleaning up your text-based posts can do a lot to save your professional façade with employers, making sure all of your pictures protect that façade as well is arguably even more important. The age-old cliché says that a picture is worth a thousand words, and that’s definitely true for social media background checks, so make sure to delete or hide any photos that could tarnish your reputation with prospective employers. Photos depicting binge drinking, drug use, nudity, illegal activity, or other questionable actions are the obvious targets, but use your own judgment here. If there’s a picture you wouldn’t want your parents to see, chances are you don’t want your future bosses to see it either.
- Post interesting, enriching content: If you have spent most of your social networking history posting inappropriate content and being a generally abrasive, immature online presence, you might do best to just delete your profiles and start from scratch. Alternatively, though, you can try to turn over a new leaf and establish a social image that friends, family, and employers alike can respect. Much is made before job interviews about deleting content that can make you look bad, but you should also focus on posting new content that makes you look good. Links to interesting articles, posts that are thoughtful and friendly, and other examples of positive social networking activity can go a long way toward building the kind of intelligent and professional social image you want to have, and can double as damage control for some of the more damning content that you are trying to cover up.
- Keep your profiles up to date: You know how annoying it is when you go to look at a business’s website, only to find that it hasn’t been updated in six months? A similar annoyance – whether conscious or subconscious – can occur when employers track down your social profiles and see that they have mostly been sitting unused and collecting dust in a dark corner of the Internet. Believe or not, defunct social pages can actually make you look like someone who doesn’t follow through with his or her projects. Avoid that impression of carelessness by keeping your active profiles updated and deleting the rest. This is especially important for something like LinkedIn, which basically doubles as your online resume, but it’s also important for blogs and other social pages as well. You wouldn’t leave a profile not updated if you were a professional social media specialist, would you? Don’t do it for your own profiles either.
Whether you are a die-hard Twitter user or just someone who checks social media once or twice a week, it’s always worth it to take a look through your content before you head off on a job interview. By simply asking yourself questions like “What would an employer think of this post?” or “Would I feel comfortable answering questions about these photos to me boss?”, you can determine where the line lies between appropriate and inappropriate content. Once you have that knowledge, you can use it to build yourself a social image that actually helps your job chances rather than hindering them.
About the Author
Michael Klazema has been developing products for pre-employment screening and improving online customer experiences in the background screening industry since 2009. He is the lead author and editor for Backgroundchecks.com. He lives in Dallas, TX with his family and enjoys the rich culinary histories of various old and new world countries.
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