Clean up your profiles! Future employers are watching you...

Imagine if the deciding factor of you getting that dream job or not, was based on whether you’d chosen the hilarious kebab on the toilet photo, or the classy dinner party photo, to be your Facebook profile picture?

We all use Facebook to stalk our friends/friends of friends/people we hate..

…but what we often forget, is that our future employers can stalk us too.

I have just come across this fascinating infographic by Career Builder called ‘What do employers find when they search for you online?’ which has stats on how many, and which type of, employers use social media to scope out candidates as potential employees.

A growing 37% of employers in the US use social media to search for you, with Facebook being the number one stalking method, closely followed by LinkedIn and Twitter. The reason most of them pry is, not because they are trying to catch you out, but because they want to see if you present yourself professionally and if you’d fit in at their company.

If there was one time that it was acceptable to Google yourself, this is it. When I Googled myself, one of the first pages that came up was my MySpace page; an account I haven’t used for many years, yet it still displayed facedown starfish drunken photos from my uni days and was littered with swear words. I swiftly deleted it. Next was my Bebo (wtf) and other random things I had signed up to. My phone number, comments and photos… I was all over the Internet! I needed to clean it up.

According to the reports, 49% of the time someone is struck off the list it’s because they have displayed a provocative photo or inappropriate information. Other reasons are evidence of drink or drug use, racism, bad mouthing their job, or simply bad grammar.

Not that my profiles had that anyway, but I felt it needed to be cleaned up. Now, you can openly view my Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Blog, my website, and Single Creatives. My Facebook is there but it’s under extreme privacy settings, and I keep the ones that are publicly viewable clean from bad language or incriminating photographs. My job revolves around search reputation and social media, so I can’t afford to have anything that makes me look unprofessional.

Sadly, your online life now acts as your CV. It’s brutal and invading, but that’s social media for you. However, you have the power to make people see what you want them to see, so start Googling yourself!