When Facebook could become a threat when you're looking for a job

          Do you have a Facebook account ? Are you looking for a job or an internship ? Or will you do it soon ? If your answer is yes for each question, you have to know that 7 out of 10 recruiters wil check your Facebook account and its content before to decide if it would be a good idea to hire you or not. So be careful about all the things shared by you or about you. It would be pitty to loose the opportunity of your life because of a photo of you drunk at your best-friend’s birthday.

To be clear, if I’m talking about the relationship between the recruitment and the social networks, you would probably think about Linkedin, the most important professional social network bought by Microsoft for 26 billion dollars. And you would be right because Linkedin is now a real tool in the working life of more and more people. But if we want to simplify Linkedin is more useful to find a candidate, the right profil thanks to millions of available resume. On the contrary, a recruiter can use Facebook to have extra informations and know who you really seem to be when you leave your office.

You never have to forget that Facebook is an open network, and often your name is the only thing that someone needs to know to find your account. You are potentially connected with each person who is able to go on the Internet. I don’t talk about some kinds of hackers or spies, but only persons like you and me with a computer and a keyboard. Your possible future boss is unfortunately for you one of them. And when you are using Facebook, you can’t hide to them all things you are sharing or reacting about, but you can at least try to narrow the risk to be penalized by what you did on this social network. 

On Facebook it’s really tempting to give an opinion or to share something. It seems that you are only with your « friends », and that you say will stay where it is without be used in the future. If you are lucky, maybe it would be the case, it’s better to act before the problem than after, so there some easy things to do. To start, the most important is to take care the confidentiality of the content of your account. It’s always better, when you are looking for a job, to choose for each subject the most efficient confidentiality, the one who allows to share your account’s content only with your friends. With this choice it would be really more difficult for a person from outside your own network to find too embarrassing things about you. And about your friends, the only ones who are able too see the biggest part of your activity, you have to think about sort the list and manage efficiently your requests.

Congratulations, your account seems already more safety. Now you have to take care about the visible part of this account. The part that everybody can see in few clics : Your profile picture and your last cover pictures. It’s not compulsory to have a real professional picture, don’t worry, but please, try to avoid your party’s pictures, your too « funny » pictures (we don’t have all the same humor), or all other kinds of pictures who present you like a person non really serious. I know, it’s possible to be really serious at work even if it’s not the case after it, but between two candidates with a similar curriculum, if one of them doesn’t seem serious in private, it seems unlikely that the recruiter would accept to take the risk to hire him. And be careful of older pictures who could stay available because of your old confidentiality Policy. And don’t forget to check the comments for each available pictures, yours and the ones of your friends. Avoid bad talking and spelling mistakes. Then you can check the design of the visible part of your account going on your profil without be connected to be sure that all is ok.

Your content seems enough protected now, but since the beginning of this article, I talk only about basic things, lots of people already know that, maybe your profile was already protect like this and you didn’t learn nothing. But now I’d like to talk about your activity on Facebook outside of your own profil or the profil of your friends. I’d like to talk about all your reactions you did about différents Facebook pages. Actually, as I said before, Facebook is an open network, and this pages could become a kind of link between you and all the users. And this connection is often an incentive to react about a content. On this network, everybody can give an opinion, can debate with people all other the world, and for this no diploma or certification is needed, everybody can participate. It’s a big maybe the main strength of this network. This flew of opinions allows to change our way to seek information, that information can always be challenging by numerous points of view and somebody who knows something about a subject can share what he knows. You just have to be careful when you are this one, because what you say can be found easily. Just try for example to go on Google, and search « your name + your surname + comment ». You probably will see links to several of your comments you posted on publications of famous Facebook page or others page you « liked ». So, when you do a debate in the comments of a page’s publication, just remember that all the things you said could be seen by people who want to know more about you. Just be careful of your opinions shared on Facebook who could be a problem.

To conclude, I said to you some tricks to protect your content from people you want to know more information about your private life, like a future recruiter. But if you only decide to manage the confidentiality of your profile, maybe it wouldn’t be enough, there is a link between the private life and the rest of the world, this link is the social networks, and you don’t have to underestimate the size of this link. I told about a job search period, but it’s only an example I used to show you how easy it is to have information about you.