NEWS: Look Who's Lurking

CULTURE: Look Who's Lurking

If you want to land that dream job, be wary of what you post on the Internet. A survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges found that future employers are likely to peep social networking profiles as part of the hiring process.



With sites like MySpace and Facebook being popular amongst college students, it is almost inevitable that someone, your boss included, will log on to dig up some dirt on you.

It's great to know that the antics of crazy college kids can be discussed and shared but not when it comes back to haunt your professional career.

I don't know about you but lurking an employee's blog is almost as bad as asking one's sexual preference during an interview. It's sneaky. Still, NACE's advice needs to be taken.

My boss hasn't heard of things like direct deposit or insurance so I'm none to worried about the internet.

I'm always kinda surprised that, like, employers would care about this. I mean, presumably the people who *don't* post pictures of their dirty bong water and keg stands still did/do those things. I suppose, this is one of those things (like being nekkid on the internet) that seems scandalous for a few years .... until the people doing the hiring are on/understand things like myspace and Facebook themselves. Then it becomes yawn inducing and very "2007."

heh, we do that at our office when people apply. it's been very...enlightening.

Dent, enlighten us! How does it affect the process?

This really shouldn't be that shocking to anyone. Employers generally don't view drug use very kindly. Not at professional workplaces anyway. And for whatever reason even the shitty jobs like Wal-Mart and McDonalds probably give drug tests. (oddly enough, my office job didn't require one)

They also wanna know that the people they hire won't be coming to work hungover. Shocking.

You know that place to put "Your Companies" on Myspace? Some people that work for the place I work put our company name in there. Then has some less than professional items on the page.

Bad idea.

This is the reality we live in. Ready for your microchip? Do not...

1a) Use your real name or a known nickname as your online identity unless you WANT people to find you, easily.

1b) That is even more important when you're LOOKING for work, when somebody thinking about hiring you might do a search for your name.

1c) Nearly every person on the planet will get a "hit" on their name when it's searched for.

2) Do not link to/list your day job by name on any site that ANYBODY at said day job would find offensive UNDER COMPANY GUIDELINES. They have no ground to stand on otherwise.

Please feel free to add more. I know it sounds dramatic, but it's really quite a serious issue. We have almost no privacy left, and frankly, it's our own fault. You've all done an online background check on yourself, right? Didn't think so. Everything about your life; your online habbits - where you go, what you search for, where you use your bank & credit cards, how and when you pay your bills, what you check out at the library, it's all being tracked by one person, entity, organization, corporation or another. That and much more, I'm sure. Big brother IS watching.

3) NEVER auto save passwords if you go online at work. lol

Egg! Zactly!

I've actually seen some coworkers, who were in the process of hiring people, do this. One colleague found a potential hire talking about smoking weed on their blog -- by googling their real name!

I asked, "Does this matter to you personally? I mean, I've seen you smoke weed. Do you think it's going to affect their job?"

She said, "Well, no, but it would matter to HR if they saw it. And I don't want to deal with a bunch of questions." I rolled my eyes and walked away.

I'd say -- this is what internet aliases are all about. (I mean, except in my case. This is my real name, of course.)

Stuff posted online stays around forever. Google and other search engines cache things, people save things to their computers, and internet archives like archive.org save all sorts of things into perpetuity. It doesn't ever, ever, ever just go away. What makes this different than newspapers and books is that you can search the entire body of text instantly. Think about that.

All those parents worrying about internet predators should also warn their kids never to put stupid crap online under their actual names. Ever.

Not to plug a product, but there is a (now actually outdated) book called Database Nation which talks alot about information misuse. It can give you some idea of the potential for all of this connectivity.

Yeah, a while back I went and made my MySpace private, and took my real name off the public face of my Amazon account (reviews I did back in the day, wish list, etc.) Som with time, the only Google hits my name turns up now are some letters to the editors of my local papers, archives of listserv discussions (related to my profession), and some other random stuff like my grandmother's obituary and press releases from my theatres.

Although, looking back, if you know my full name (including my two middle names), you could find out I belong to SG. But I don't put my full full name on much of anything, so I don't think it's too big a deal.

Well said, well said.

I think I'm one of the lucky few. I often search the internet for several different combinations of my first middle and last names, and I've only come up with one hit: my amazon wishlist.

How dare they look at public information you posted for the world to see!

this is the kind of thing that makes me nervous. i dont think i currently have anything to worry about, nothing that would be considered "improper" by an employer... but that is the #1 reason that i am still just debating sending in a set to sg. it is something i want, and believe in... but i dont think it is well understood enough by the general public, and i dont want to risk my future career... damn internet! haha

[/thread]

How abou tthe people that e-mail a resume' in and the e-mail address is something like:

69all_the_time@hotmailcom

LeatherKinkKing@aol.com

A boss told me she got resumes like that.

My mom gets stuff like that all the frigging time.

Really hammers home the fact that people are, in fact, mostly dumb.

I just did a search on my name. My future employers might find out that I'm an argumentative geek. I have a pretty common name, but I personally show up a lot in a google search.

Thinking about this, we do this irl all the time. I have a name for my friends, I have a name for my family, as a writer I have multiple pseudonyms for my work. With the internet I guess it's just a matter of specific task id. Career name, play name, etc.

I'd say the only difference is that if one can set-up a business identity (credit cards, personal IDs, websites, the more "diversionary" [is that even a word?] information the better) one should. I think it's perhaps unlikely that companies having my credit card info for porn will come back to haunt. But all the same, it can't hurt to have mulitple financial identities (though it probably flirts with legality)

But since we're on the subject. Think how efficient organized murder could be at this point in time. Or say Cheney and co decided it was prudent to "kill off the queers." The self-identified politically active queer population of America could be "exterminated" in two weeks or less.

wow, the more I think about this the more I'm turned on to having multiple identities.

That is why I have my professional email and my fun one for random internet crap.

that would be true if they weren't using it to dig up information that has nothing to do with your work performance, for discriminatory purposes.

With sites like MySpace and Facebook being popular amongst college students, it is almost inevitable that someone, your boss included, will log on to dig up some dirt on you.

What about this site?

We're becoming a society of finger pointers.

Most of the time when i start a job, i usually am the one that has to do most of the IT work, because that crazy interweb is so difficult to understand

It's all those tubes, criss-crossing, twisting. It can be very confusing to some folks, like, saaaaay, Congressman.