Are you Scared your Employer may Find your Facebook?

I’m really getting sick and tired of hearing people complain how employers searching social networks for employees or potential candidates is a violation of their privacy. Many of them argue that on sites like Facebook, even if they are careful and don’t upload pictures of them getting trashed last weekend, their friends may upload the pictures tagging them so the picture is found anyways by “no fault” of their own.

Rather than complaining why not use it to your advantage.  More & more college students are turning to business blogging and social networks to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in a very public way.  So you may have a few pictures smoking a joint or doing a keg stand but rather than complain about “privacy violations” on the world wide web, flood the bad with good.  I know a number of individuals who started blogging while in college.  They were heavily involved in social media and they were way ahead of the curve relative to their classmates.  Now those individuals have really good jobs, even in a polarized economy, and they are actually helping initiatives within these larger companies to implement corporate blogging & micro-blogging.

If you take initiative and take an hour a day to blog & provide very positive and worthwhile content current or future employers probably won’t be as concerned with the bad.  When they Google your name, why shouldn’t your profile on LinkedIn or Brazen Careerist pop up first. Heck, why shouldn’t your personal/business blog pop up first.  This will definitely overshadow the bad and they may not even find the bad because they’ll be so busy learning from your blog.  If you just sit back and whine, you’re going to get passed up by someone with a little more savvy.

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Tagged as: blog, Brazen Careerist, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Privacy, Social media, Social network, Stephen Schultz, steve-schultz