More Warnings Against Oversharing on MySpace

Skapare writes "Your next prospective employer might be watching your MySpace page, according to a story at the New York Times. And if you think Facebook is more private, maybe not if that prospective employer has an intern from the same school checking up on you." From the article: "Students may not know when they have been passed up for an interview or a job offer because of something a recruiter saw on the Internet. But more than a dozen college career counselors said recruiters had been telling them since last fall about incidents in which students' online writing or photographs had raised serious questions about their judgment, eliminating them as job candidates."

Woohoo!

This is great news; my Facebook site is a combination resume, cover letter, and reference letters. Hey recruiters, this way!

Re:Woohoo!

But I guess anyone who is stupid enough to drop themselves in the poo in public shouldn't be a prime candidate for employment.

Yes, it's so much better to hire a candidate who conducts his dirty business in secret -- embezzling, clandestine affairs with the secretaries, etc.

It's as much the employer's loss here

There are many highly qualified and intelligent people here (it's a top 20 university) with very vapid social lives.

these employers using google and myspace to research their prospective employees may as well be basing their decisions on the bible or the magic 8 ball.

There are many people who can quickly switch personalities to a work mode, many of the most intelligent are also the most eccentric as well. Passing people up because of eccentricity, quirks, or political views will harm employers in the end.

Re:It's as much the employer's loss here

You know intelligence isn't everything when hiring. People with vapid social lives may be generally annoying to their co-workers, and thus actually be a hindrance to a group effort.

Re:It's as much the employer's loss here

Imagine a workplace where I am actually trying to accomplish something and then add some chatty fool who keeps trying to tell me about his personal life, preventing me from getting said work done. That is the situation I have in mind.

Re:It's as much the employer's loss here

And this point brings up something really scary. What happens when you use your rights to privacy, and choose not to post anything about your private life on the Internet? Do employers start interviewing MySpace users first (because they are at least a known quantity), or even dropping your resume completely?

IMO, this is just a question of references. If you are able to provide suitable character and work references on your resume, then your employers shouldn't be considering additional references that you did not provide. Maybe it will be decided that listing MySpace as a reference is acceptable, but there is no guarantee as to accuracy. Prospective employers don't have the right (as far as I know) to call random co-workers from your past, your drinking buddies, or your old high school friends to dig for dirt. I can't imagine that they would examine the transcript of an argument you got in at a bar, which is what a lot of online flames degenerate to. If employees want their online lives evaluated, it should be optional, with no reasonable expectation of consequence if they refuse.

Re:It's as much the employer's loss here

Personally, I set up a couple of fake myspace accounts for 'former employers' where they have a reference to what great work i've done, or how I solved a problem that really saved the companies ass ('sometimes I wonder if this company could have survived the last 2 years without the help of surt's real name here'. I bury it in with a ton of other material about the daughter's birthday or this or that so it won't look too blatant or fake hopefully. I believe it would be enough to fool most people's first search efforts, and should even pass an uncareful examination.

Anyone who goes googling for me on the internet is going to find that apparently there are a number of people who think really highly of me as a coworker.

Re:It's as much the employer's loss here

The fact is, employers don't want to work with people who publicly admit using drugs and dirty sex as their recreational time.

It may appear sad but it's the terrible truth

Re:It's as much the employer's loss here

There are many highly qualified and intelligent people here (it's a top 20 university) with very vapid social lives.

They aren't very intelligent if they post about it publicly online.

Re:It's as much the employer's loss here

Or perhaps they feel the value of having a place, public or not, where they can vent themselves is worth the price of a couple missed jobs due to employers who demand that people they consider for jobs be identically stiff at work and away from work.

Honestly, I would not want to work for any employer who thought that they should have any control whatsoever over my personal life when it is not affecting my work, nor one who considered me incapable of conducting myself professionally based on completely unrelated situations.

Re:It's as much the employer's loss here

Amazingly enough there is something known as anonymity on the internet. In other words you make sure it's not easy to find your blog using whatever info you provide to your employer.

I've always view these types of things as great filters, removing the people from my life that I would not want to associate with anyway. Don't like me because I'm funny/had purple hair when I was younger/listen to Dream Theater/love Sushi/am left handed/have OMG, political views/get drunk once in a while/whatever? Oh well, have a nice life.

Who really cares what they find out about me? I don't apologize for having freedom and using it; and I accept the consequences of the same. I don't want to associate with people (including employers) who would first hunt down that information and second use it to discriminate against me in some way. With friends/employers like that, who needs enemies?

(And ya, I realize the irony in posting this as a more or less anonymous identity, but this is /. afterall.) :)

Re:It's as much the employer's loss here

There are many people who can quickly switch personalities to a work mode, many of the most intelligent are also the most eccentric as well. Passing people up because of eccentricity, quirks, or political views will harm employers in the end.

Yet, the damaging information about those people, information that they personally posted, is out there for anyone to access. This time the bosses happen to access them but what about the prospective clients and business partners? Independently of that person's competence and professional attitude, what damage can a public profile like that bring to a company?

As I see it this has a lot in common with politics. What does it matter if a political candidate smoked pot or even if he's into S&M? Isn't his competence the only thing that matters? Yet, when the public learns about those details the would-be politician is automatically done for, even if the voters or political opponents do as bad or even worse than him. It's all about public image and if someone is involved in socially questionable things and if that information passes to that person's professional environment and life, then obviously it will have an impact.

Oh and let's not forget that the person in question bragged about doing drugs, which not only is considered ilegal in a lot of countries but it can also, at least to some extent, be a liability.

Re:It's as much the employer's loss here

Yet, the damaging information about those people, information that they personally posted, is out there for anyone to access. This time the bosses happen to access them but what about the prospective clients and business partners?

I refer you further up in this story to the post from the guy who happens to have a shared name, age, and major with someone else.

In truth, when you google someone's name or search for it on myspace there is no guarantee it's the same person.. you may as well be shaking your magic 8 ball: "is this employee responsible and cordial?"? "ask again later"

Depends on the job surely?

I already posted this link in a other replay, but they this is slashdot and posting a dupe might just get me to be an editor. Arthur Andersen [wikipedia.org] was a boring stiff off an accountant who build up a highly successfull firm. Then it all went to hell. Now how much do you want to bet that the guys who ruined the firm were the kind of people that if myspace had been available in their time would have posted pics of themselves doing stuff frowned upon at the time.

Yes a marketting job could well do with someone who stands out. For a lot of real jobs it don't matter shit. You don't care what your plumber did in school did you?

But for a lot of the more exciting/succesfull jobs who you are matters because the risk for choosing the wrong person are high.

Tell me, what kind of pilot do you want. One who leads a perfectly boring life who just spend a quiet weekend home with his wife and kids or one who just spend the weekend on a drug and booze filled rampage? Who do you want managing your stocks. Someone with all the political motivation of a jellyfish or someone who firmly believes money is the root of all evil?

Do you want an eccentric person in charge or a nuclear powerplant. A police officer with quircks, a judge with political views (especially one that doesn't agree with yours)?

Luckily most people never need to worry about this. There are plenty of jobs out there where they don't give a shit what you do in your private life. And I can't help but feel that if you want a bigger job then you should be willing to adjust what you do in your private life so you can get the big bucks.

If you want to be your own person in your personal life then the price is that you will have to accept the kind of job where your personal life don't matter. The fast majority of jobs will be open to you. Sure the fast majority of jobs also have bad pay and are boring but hey, at least you got a full and un-spyed upon private life.

Re:It's as much the employer's loss here

"There are many people who can quickly switch personalities to a work mode, many of the most intelligent are also the most eccentric as well. Passing people up because of eccentricity, quirks, or political views will harm employers in the end."

I don't know -- half the contracting work I get is solely because of my vapid personality that I love displaying on the internet :)

I do and say quite a bit of obnoxious opinionated bullshit, though at the same time, this is exactly what is needed in my field -- someone that actually believes in his particular line of BS and willing to stand behind it. In different lives, I deal with the music industry where it is imparative that you not obviously compromise your values whatever they may be, as well as being a senior developer / manager in the software side of things where you need to be able to stick with a belief through a project in order to deliver a cohesive project (and not something that is the product of every idiot that thinks they have a stake in its creation and thus should get equal billing / equal chance of getting their unneeded feature ruining the workflow of the rest).

It may be different for young people...I had taken a class on CSS last year and it was amazing all the folks willing to suck it up for their potential employeers. Maybe I'm old enough I know what I'm willing to put up with and what I'm not -- as well as established enough in two disciplines that I've been known to quit one (being told I'll never work in that industry again by the very folks that come to me begging for a reference a year later) to do the other when life becomes too unbearable -- and doing it seemlessly. I guess its good to be old for once.

All in all, I would never work for an employeer that asked me to act differently at work than I do 'at play'. No, I'm not going to show up plastered and blatently hit on the interns (ok, this is slashdot, so I'm posting theoretically) -- but past that, my personality is the same either place for the good or bad. I gotta say, without my obnoxious personality, I would have never worked on the projects that I have in my academic or creative fields. Hell, I guess one of my first internships in computers was working for the US gov't and I was several years older than the others going for the same position and when the interview started going south based on my lack of experience (i.e., because I was off living a life while the 20 year olds applying for the job had their noses in their books but even though we were going for the same job, my age played a factor) I pointed out to my future boss that I wanted the job so badly that I almost missed it risking my car being impounded (and having to have it searched by 3 police officers) as I had a rather large anarchy symbol painted on it and a Eff The System type logo painted on the side (this was pre-911, pre-Oklahoma which was lucky as I was interviewing with the IRS) -- he laughed in the straight laced sort of way that I ended up loving him for, and said if he I could point out the car in the parking lot from the window, I had the job -- and when he saw how obnoxious it was he just laughed and shook my hand welcoming me to the job pending background checks and internal lie detector testing (and believe me, my 'love of the system' came up with the polygrapher telling me that I was one of the more honest people he had ever interviewed -- ended up getting security clearance that a college intern shouldn't have possibly been given, IMHO).

So the point is, if its you and you are comfortable with it, post it online. If you aren't and you are ashamed of your personality to the point you think that you need to make accomodations in public for it -- then there is something you need to change in yourself and as a current employeer, I wouldn't hire you either if your private personality didn't live up to your professional one.

Re:It's as much the employer's loss here

> Passing people up because of eccentricity, quirks, or political views will harm employers in the end.

True, but passing up people that post pictures of themselves violating several local laws whilst naked is not necessarily a bad idea. Have you seen some people's facebook pages? "Hi there, I'm completely wasted and people are drawing on me with a permanent marker. Hire me?"

More news from the obvious forefront

While it's not much a surprise that employers would do some unconventional background checking, the article seems to make it seem increasingly prevalent. Unless you are completely in an online pseudonym, don't portray yourself in a manner online that you wouldn't want seen in real life. As far as a Google search is concerned, I can't find much with just a straight name search. My only online profile would be a Facebook listing where nothing is risque.

Modern Net Exhibitionism and Slutism ...

On the Internet - everybody knows that you are a perv' ...

Not only MySpace...

Unfortunate postings to Slashdot are also pretty, well, unfortunate, because Slashdot has a high Google-rank, so your Slashdot postings will place highly in Google on a search for your name. I don't think you can get a Slashdot comment removed.

It's really a good thing

In my opinion this could be as much of a good thing as it is a bad thing. Sure if you write all sorts of useless MySpace one line "lol ponies are cute!!!!" comments then yes, you may be less likely to be hired. But then again making such comments indicates that you are a fairly shallow, and possibly annoying person, and thus may not be a good person to hire. On the other hand if you are generally insightful and have useful things to say then it would seem that you would be more likely to be hired, and I can't think of that as a bad thing. So in general if you act like an idiot you are less likely to be hired, if you act like an adult you are more likely to be hired. If we feel that this is an acceptable consequence of real life behavior why shouldn't it be an acceptable consequence of online behavior?

Google for potential candidates

Every so often, I get an email from someone I've never heard of, asking how I've been and why I never respond to email at some other account. Turns out there's someone else with my name, of a similar age (well, plus or minus 5 years, I guess), in the same country, and studying informatics of some form (AI rather than CS). Also, he appears to be impossible to find contact details for. I'm not making this up, and unless spammers have suddenly become much more intelligent and literate (and created a specialist website to back up their story), these are quite genuine requests.

What's to guarantee that the person a company finds on Myspace or Livejournal - I don't know much about Facebook - is the same person they're actually considering employing? I'd be quite upset to find I'm suddenly employed and expected to be an expert in genetic algorithms, when my total experience with them is a couple of lectures several years ago. Names aren't unique, and sometimes there are enough similarities that I'm contacted by people who believe they know me personally.

My employer

I'm an intern at a software development firm and when looking for another intern, my employer asked me to look the person up on Facebook - so this is a very real issue.

But I did not know the person, nor did anyone I knew, so it had no effect on the hiring of them.

Well

No real suprise here, it's been coming for a long time. With so many people thinking they will never be seen on the net and that only a small amount of people can reach their personal pages, smart employers will google around for them and find out a lot more about the person than they need to know and you can't blame them, that way they will find the best candidate for the job no matter what CV they are presented with or how many qualifications you have.

It may be a harsh way to do things, and some may argue that work should stay work and personal life should be private, but if you compromise yourself publically on the web - expect to reap what you sow.

Good thing this doesn't happen to doctors

Doctors spend a lot of time in school and if you ever lived in a uni town then you will know that they are not exactly known as responsible mature adults. Best that you don't know what that young intern in charge of saving your life was upto just last year. Hell better not know what he was up to last night. (Although to be honest what he did 24 hours ago was probably being on the same shift he is still on)

What seems kinda silly is however to go to far with this. The odd thing is that those kids who do extreme things are the ones who do best in real life. I should know, I didn't as a kid and I am very mediocre in my adult life.

Who do you want in your company? Joe Average or somebody going places? For certain jobs yes somebody with a solid boring past is perhaps best. Chartered accountants would be nice to know they never ever broke any law of any kind ever. Read up on Arthur Andersen [wikipedia.org] to see what happens when you go from the boring accountants to the exciting ones.

What is a problem is that people who do stuff like posting pictures of themselves smoking pot online then seem to want the kind of job that calls for people who think a cup of tea is a rollercoaster ride. There are just certain kind of proffesions where your entire life will come under close scrutiny. It doesn't matter so much as what you did but how easily it can be found out. Have an affair as president just don't let it get into the papers.

The problem is that we fear overlap. Is the guy who smoked pot in college still doing it? That doesn't really even matter, cocaine has a certain respectability. What matters, is he still stupid enough to post evidence of criminal behaviour for the entire world to see?

Women especially are truly stupid in this regard. Take your top off in front of a camera and those pictures WILL find their way onto the internet. Surely everyone knows this by now? Yes women still take their kit off and act all suprised when they end up on the net. How much are you willing to bet that if these women ever want to have a position with any importance later in life these pictures will come back to haunt them?

I bring this up because I recently had a rather weird discussion with a co-worker about this whose pictures off an art thing she did in university came up. She was full frontal in some play they did. It was art. When I asked her why none of her fellow male students were in any kind of naked state she was unable to find a reason. I noticed this before. A lot of times women in art go naked while the males telling them it is for art keep their clothes on. Odd that.

But she is now known on the workfloor not for her brains or years of good work but her perky tits. This doesn't matter if like me you got no ambition but if you want to move up who do you think they are going to choose. The guy who jerked off to naked girls or the girl that got naked?

Life ain't fair, that boss who drives his suv while drunk will not hire the kid who smoked a joint and the boss who fucks his secretary half his age will not give a promotion to a woman who got her kit off. If you got ambition, think about what you do. And while it ain't entirely fair, I am not certain I want the world to be run by people who can't think ahead. Is somebody who can't think ahead about his own future really fit to think ahead about say a companies future or even the entire country?

Re:Good thing this doesn't happen to doctors

But she is now known on the workfloor not for her brains or years of good work but her perky tits.

link to pics,plz ; )

Not only MySpace

Imagine if a prospective employer saw your Slashdot postings!

Employer: I'm sorry but your just not the person we're looking for.
You: But why?
Employer: We saw that all your Slashdot posts were rated -1 Troll and our company doesn't need anymore trolls.
You: Damn it!

It works both ways of course

Next time you're going for an interview, look up the interviewer.

You might find that the higly professional lady wearing a smart business suit spends her weekends dressed up in strange clothing and hanging around with a motorcycle gang, to pick a real example at random.

Not only your (future) employer is watching..

Also your government:

""I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves." So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster are a snoop's dream.

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals."

Full story at: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg190255 56.200 [newscientist.com]

Employer Filter

Probably like many slashdotters I've had a web presence for a while. In my case, I've had a persistent web page since 1996 - the early middle part of the contemporary Web's ramp up. Since putting the site up, I've been very careful about what information I choose to put in public directories about myself -- knowing full well that the information is, well, PUBLIC. I'm not saying I shy away from controversy. I'm an atheist, skeptic, scientist, and writer and have many links and comments about said topics on my site. Some of these things are not generally popular. When I hit the job market after my Ph.D. I simply ASSUMED people would Google me. And, lo and behold, in at least half the interviews someone would say "I saw your website and loved such-and-such." In some ways I used my website as an employer filter: if someone would not hire me based on information on my site, I would not want to work for them anyway.

Clearly many people who are creating myspace sites have a strange relationship with this very public forum. On one hand they view it and understand it as public. It is the web afterall and everyone is just a Google search away. But yet they still seem to place a psychological shield around it. So while they surely must know it is public, they still regard it as somehow very private and personal ("my space") and are shocked when people hold them accountable for the information content they advertise.

Same problem with UseNet

I had a pretty wild time at University and eventually dropped out because of it. This was back in 1991, and some of my posts on Usenet were pretty telling about what I was doing in my life at the time.

Of course, at that time we were quite naive and none of us realised what the Internet would turn into.

When Google released the Usenet archives for searching I had to scamper to get all my posts (hundreds of them) removed from the archive, as my employers would probably not have been too pleased - for a week or so my name in the google search engine produced thousands of posts none of which I am proud of now.

So?

I'm all for personal privacy, but I think one great thing about MySpace is that it's hard to "fake it". You can pretend to be somebody you're not, but by and large kids in particular are really savvy to this kind of "fronting". Let's just all be who we are, whether we smoke weed, like kinky wierd sex acts, or are a creepy vegetarian. Let's stop lying about it and just have a good time, online and off. People are such fucking cry babies I swear. If every person in the country was totally honest about who they were, and these lame corporations still had all their lame "standards", they'd quickly not have ANY employees. Trying to make everyone pretend to be something they're not is just stupid.

Go ahead and check my MySpace, my piss, my driving record, and my credit record. I ain't perfect, but I'm a good worker and I get the job done, and there's probably about 200 million others of me in this country so STFU.

rhY