Your social media ranting could sink your job prospects
Did things get a little heated on your social media feed after the recent election? Be careful. It could prevent you from getting hired.
Donald Trump got the top job in America despite his penchant for shooting from the lip on Twitter, but other job seekers aren’t so lucky. More and more, an ill-tempered tweet or a crude Facebook rant can disqualify you from a job.
According to an April survey by the job site CareerBuilder, 60 percent of employers comb social networking sites to research job candidates. Of those, 46 percent said they’d reject a candidate if they found “provocative” photos, videos or information; 43 percent object to information about drinking or drugs; and 33 percent said they’d toss a candidate for “discriminatory comments related to race, religion, gender, etc.”
An offensive social media post can not only keep you out of a job, it can also cost you the one you have, of course. Just last month in Georgia, Jane Wood Allen, a Forsyth County Schools paraprofessional, was canned after a Facebook post in which she called first lady Michelle Obama “a gorilla.”
If you’re considering sanitizing your social media history, it can be a daunting task. You have to deal with not only your own posts, but also those of others where you commented or where someone tagged you. Early adopters of Facebook may need to go back as much as a decade to find those photos of their brotastic frat party keg-stands they need to delete.
Tech entrepreneurs naturally see a business opportunity in fixing things. ReputationDefender starts at $3,000 a year for hands-on help scrubbing your online mentions. There’s also Reputation.com and other services, such as BrandYourself and Social U, that provide a free scan of your accounts and then charge to help clean them up.
Another is Scrubber.social, which just added political screening to its scans for profanity, drugs, alcohol, check-ins at strip clubs and other potentially embarrassing posts made by you or your connections. The scan is free, and users can pay $15 for 48-hour access to tools that will help them clean up problematic posts, or $30 for a yearly subscription, says founder Ryan Angilly.
Angilly added political screening to the mix based on the flaring tempers on his own social media pages.
“My hunch was mainly from seeing all the vitriol on my own Facebook page and on Twitter, and it turned out to be spot on,” Angilly says. “We reached out to our free customers and the overwhelming response was that people were looking for political searching as well.”
Social media information can help you as well in your job hunt. According to the CareerBuilder survey, about one-third of employers who review social media found information that prompted them to hire an applicant, such as, “Candidate’s personality came across as a good fit with company culture.”
And it’s not just college kids making the move to the career world who need to worry about their online past. Increasingly, even middle-aged professionals find themselves haunted by their posts.
It’s even hitting job hunters applying to join the Trump administration. According to CNN, the Trump transition team’s vetting of potential administration hires includes “scouring potential appointees’ social media accounts. Some people were weeded out for having been publicly critical of Trump in the past.”
Brian J. O’Connor is an award-winning columnist for The Detroit News. Contact him at brian@funnymoneyblog.com or visit www.funnymoneyblog.com.
