STONE COLD HAVEN
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When Facebook decides your job prospects
Posted: December 12, 2009, 10:54 am by Darius Stone
For most people, losing out on a job opportunity is quite a depressing affair. When you get that world famous “Unfortunately on this occasion, you were not successful…” letter, self doubt and low confidence invariably creeps in – even before insult is added to injury with the pretence of the letter’s author wishing you all the best in your job search.
Imagine then when the reason for you not getting a job is self inflicted. And it has nothing to do with your performance on the day of the interview. Well, it was only a matter of time before employers resorted to using Facebook for intelligence gathering about current or prospective employees. It’s like everything else in life, we don’t think it’ll ever happen to us and demons from our past come back to haunt us like a nonsense.
I bumped into a casual friend who was still job hunting and he was lamenting how times are tough out there. We occasionally have a drink at the local watering hole and have a good chin wag. His latest disappointment was that a prospective employer admitted to him that he had to make a tough decision on who to appoint and the young man lost out because this employer decided to look at the Facebook profiles of the last 3 candidates in question. Let’s just say, his own Facebook profile left a lot to be desired and he admitted that if he was the employer, he wouldn’t employ himself based on the shenanigans on his profile.
I sometimes wonder why people assume that their online persona’s are a plug and play component of their life that they can switch on and off when it’s convenient. It’s even more damaging for those who don’t realise the intricate electronic footprint that they leave behind with every single action they take on an electronic network – whether it be the office network or the internet. The register of mortified parents is littered with those who are shocked beyond repair when they find out that their kids as young as 12 are taking nude photos of themselves on cell phones and posting them on YouTube – simply because they think it’s cool and everyone is doing it.
Years ago in a job that I did in a previous life, I was nicknamed the ’Network Hitler’. This was because of my no nonsense ruthlessness when dealing with misguided colleagues who thought the company network was their pissing pot. Instead of carrying on with their job like the rest of us, they spent most of their working hours visiting some unsavoury websites that would make anyone’s mother blush and die in embarrassment.
I ordinarily wouldn’t mind, but when the alert console on my screen keeps popping up dialog boxes every 10 seconds telling me that someone is continuously trying to visit porn sites that the network has quarantined, then it becomes an itch that I have to scratch. My M.O was simply to freeze the account remotely and force the employee to explain to their supervisor why the guys in IT have blocked his network account and why he can’t work. Let’s just say I rarely bought drinks and dinner on nights out with colleagues…and only I knew why.
But my advice to all the transgressors was that the minute they logged onto my network – I owned their arse and could tell every single thing that they did and every single location on the internet that they visited and what they did there. I was sometimes shocked by the brazen and reckless attitude of most internet users, including company directors who were oblivious to the ability of a network to retain certain information. We of course acted absolutely professionally and without question – but if you gave me an itch, I would scratch it.
There was even an occasion while resolving a virus attack, I came across a series of emails that had two colleagues explicitly discussing their affair notwithstanding the fact that the woman’s husband worked for the same company and I knew all three of them. It was my job to fix the virus and not to be a marriage counsellor and the professional thing to do was forget every single thing I had just seen in the emails.
I’m still amazed today when I see how clueless some folks are when it comes to being careful with their internet footprint. The internet is a very small place and believe it or not, it’s possible to do something or say something that will come back to haunt you. Facebook seems to be the new frontier. Only recently in the UK, some woman lost her job because she constantly bitched about how her boss was a nasty piece of work and how she hated to go to work. Her only problem was that she forgot that her boss was one of her Facebook friends and could read every single thing she wrote on her wall.
The boss didn’t disappoint for he handed the woman her notice of a summary dismissal right on her Facebook wall telling her not to bother coming into work on Monday and that her P45 was in the mail.
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