In my opinion, I think social media can either be very interesting tools or very dangerous when it interferes with professional life. It is for sure a good way to connect with friends and it is wonderful if you try to find back your first high school love. But (cause yeah there is a huge “but” here), you have to be aware of the fact that absolutely everything you post on the web will stay on the web even if you think you deleted it.
Nowadays, companies employ a new kind of professionals. Their title? Headhunters.
Those people are experts in finding on the web all the information they need concerning actual or new employees. And don’t even wonder, they are able to find absolutely everything that refers to you. It could be a simple phone number but also this very one picture you posted and didn’t want to remember on which you appear drunk as hell and barely naked.
A French survey has been led about facebook. The goal was to understand better why people share that much information about their private life. To the following question : “Why do you post pictures of you and your friends on facebook?”, most of them answered it is to have memories. But why? Do memories need to appear on a public social tool to be remembered? If we are being honest here, it just seems to be an ego thing. We want to expose ourselves to receive good comments about how we look, how the party we threw was awesome, we want to make people react about our lives.
So, my advice would be : never post anything on a social media tool that could damage your image or your reputation in another context. Have you heard this story about that girl who told her boss she couldn’t go to work cause she was sick? Imagine his reaction when he found out pictures of her on facebook, laying by the pool cocktails in each hand. I let you guess who is still desperately looking for a job today…
Also, check how many friends you have on facebook and wonder : among them, who do I really consider as my real friends?
Alexia
“Headhunter” is a term that has been around for decades, long before social media, the Internet or even personal computers. But used in the context that you have, the term is really quite ironic. Nowadays, the term “headhunter,” as it is used in the world of business, might actually be more à propos to its origins in the jungles of far away, “savage” worlds where human life was not universally valued.
ReplyDeleteNowadays, “headhunters” might not only ferret out job candidates who don’t have the right credentials; they might also chop heads of long-time (aging), hardworking (hard-partying?) existing employees because of their postings on Facebook, Twitter or blogs.
According to my dictionary (yes, I looked it up in a BOOK!), the term “headhunter” originated in 1853 and it is defined as “the act or custom of seeking out, decapitating, and preserving the heads of enemies as trophies; a seeking to deprive usually political enemies of position or influence.”
And so a word to the wise: Today’s headhunter is just as likely not to get you a job but to bounce you from the one that you’re in for having posted something online that doesn’t jive with your employer’s corporate culture.