Thursday, September 18, 2008

Ruining Your Career with Social Networking SItes

There is a growing trend of people making career-limiting moves by putting inappropriate information on their personal pages on MySpace or Facebook. As potential employers and college admissions officers increase their use of the internet for recruitment and retention, public embarrasment on the internet can be costly.

There have already been a number of incidents of people being fired for information on social networking sites. Examples include foul language, trashing of employers and not-too-flattering pictures. It is becoming common for organizations to "Google" prospective employees as part of a background check. And certainly a MySpace page with pictures from your last drunken happy hour are not going to help establish you as a viable candidate. It is important to understand that social networking sites are so "new" that there is no established set of "best practices" or case law defining how prospective employers may use the internet to perform research.

Some people are limited themselves even before they start their careers.

A recent report based on 500 top colleges showed that some of them use MySpace and other social networking sites to review college applicants. Of the ones that do, 38% of the respondents indicated that what they saw negatively impacted their view of the candidate.

So far there are no clear policies established around the use of information made public by people on their own web pages. But clearly people are already making mistakes that are very costly.

Of course, the obvious security issue is that people MUST establish privacy settings so that their pages are not available to the general public. As obvious as this sounds, many people are still leaving their sites open.

Security Tip: Establish privacy settings so your posts are not visible to the general public. Even with privacy in place, never put offensive language or pictures on your social networking site. You never know who may be able to see your page through a trusted "friend."