Selfies with your cat are OK, but that picture of you doing a keg stand in college? Not so much.
So should you even bother conducting a social-media sweep as you prepare to look for a new job? Yes. But a focused approach is necessary.
Even though a few ranty posts or risqué photos won't necessarily cost you a job, a social media presence has become a part of every job candidate's résumé — and résumés need to reflect you in your best light.
A 2012 survey by Jobvite found that 92 percent of recruiters now use social media as a part of their recruiting process. In fact, many companies require that you have a strong online presence as a way to help promote the company, should you get the job. And if they require it, you'd better bet they're going to look at yours.
The good news: Your online presence is just a snapshot of who you are. To a recruiter, your social media profile is like the cover to your book: It should be clean, vaguely explain what your work and life are about, give a hint at your personality — and that's pretty much it. Job recruiters typically aren't Googling your name and looking back at all the archived pages of the search results. The job interview is the place where they want to find out more about you — and they don't care about a bad breakup or photos of you in a sexy pirate costume. But these images shouldn't be the first things they see either.
The bad news: Your social media presence is still a reflection of your tastes, your judgment, and your professionalism. You want the first thing a recruiter sees to be an accurate portrait of who you really are and what you represent as a person and as a potential employee.
Relax, you don't have to go deleting your accounts (remember, that won't do any good anyway). But there are a few things you can do to clean up your social media pages that will help you on your job hunt.
Set your Facebook page to private.
Facebook is above all else a sharing tool. It has reconnected millions of friends and family members who are now invested in each other's lives in ways that weren't possible before Facebook. You don't have to lose that. But you don't have to share it with everyone either. If you want to keep all your cat photos, selfies, personal narratives, and intimate or political thoughts on Facebook, set it to private and be choosy about who you allow in.
Reevaluate your "Friends."
A "strong online presence" typically makes us think of volume: The more followers, the more friends and the more likes we acquire, the more powerful we appear! Well, not exactly. Even if you set your Facebook page to private, every one of your "friends" can see your posts. You have to ask yourself if you trust all these people with your personal information.
Plus, if you don't know a lot about your fringe "friends," they don't know a lot about you beyond what you regularly post online. What does that picture look like? What if that person winds up working at your dream company? Are you confident that the professional image you want to reflect comes through clearly via the only way they regularly interact with you?
When in doubt, keep actual, known friends as "Friends" and list everyone else as an "Acquaintance," which means you haven't un-friended them, but they won't see your posts unless you change your privacy settings. You can adjust everyone's access to your Facebook page in the settings.
Create a solid, purely professional LinkedIn profile.
LinkedIn is the social media tool built specifically for networking and job recruitment. That Jobvite survey that revealed that most recruiters are looking you up online also tells us that 93 percent of them are primarily using LinkedIn to do so. While new features allow you to post multiple photos of yourself, link to stories and even blog, it's in your best interests to stick to the things that make your LinkedIn stand out: Create a clear, focused description of your career interests and work experience, solicit endorsements, and show work samples.
"It's important to engage the community as well, but be wary of what you say," LinkedIn spokesperson Lindsey Pollak told CNN.com. "Remove complaints about your job or boss, any confidential work information, and photos of yourself acting in a way that could be construed as inappropriate." Again, save the rants and selfies for your private Facebook.
Be careful how you tweet.
Twitter has become a no-holds-barred space for news, opinion, and expression. It's where important international news stories are breaking instantaneously, social protests are forming, and hashtag conversations are changing the way we think and feel. The freedom on Twitter also allows for profanity, nudity, and conversations that involve tense discussions on race, religion, politics — you name it. You don't have to shy away from these conversations or hide what you believe in. But be wary of how you engage in them. Too many F-bombs, or even one instance of offensive name-calling, can ruin your online reputation and make you appear to be a risk to employers.
Who you follow matters too. Remember that the tweets and links of everyone you follow shows up in your feed too. It would behoove you to un-follow anyone who is regularly combative, uses profanity or constantly tags you in his or her tweets.
Create an identity for your Twitter.
Do you like to tweet haikus or simply retweet top news stories? Do you primarily use Twitter to promote your brand (that is, the thing you do for work — we are all brands) or are you just trying to get laughs? Figuring out who you are on Twitter can help employers figure you out too. For example, if you work in fashion, your Twitter feed should reflect that you follow trends, read industry publications, follow designers and style icons, and join conversations that are topical to your industry. It's an opportunity to engage on a topic that interests you already, and also create a degree of expertise. If your feed also includes political rants, insults directed at other Twitter users, or distasteful photos, that air of expertise may be lost.
If you feel like you've missed something in this deep cleaning of your online self, there's even an app that can help you. By adding a few key words, topics, and tags, SimpleWash will do the scrubbing for you.
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