A Lasting Presence

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A Lasting Presence

Posted on March 31, 2014

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Gone are the days when potential employers simply viewed your CV and spoke to your referees. Now employers can get a genuine insight into the person you are, the company you keep and how you present yourself first hand. This is thanks to social media of course. It can be a positive or negative thing depending on how you use and manage your pages/posts. But one thing is for sure, once you put it out there, be it a picture, a comment, a statement, whatever it may be, there is no taking it back. Rest assured it has been seen by someone and can resurface when you least want it to. According to Jobvite’s 2012 social recruiting survey:

•    92 percent of employers use, or plan to use, social recruiting;
•    73 percent of employers have successfully hired a candidate via social; and,
•    31 percent of recruiters using social media have seen a sustained increase in employee referrals.

(http://www.collegerecruiter.com/blog/2013/07/10/think-before-you-post-how-social-media-platforms-like-snapchat-vine-and-facebook-can-impact-your-job-search/)

This is one reason why you need to be conscious and careful of what you are putting onto these sites, as it can and will come back to haunt you. Whether you mean something to be offensive or not, it may be perceived a completely different way than intended. We see celebrities, public figure heads and even everyday people making very costly mistakes on social media. 

This infamous tweet of just 64 characters caused a media frenzy and Justine Sacco’s (the former PR executive at media company IAC) world was turned upside down. It was an incredibly foolish and insensitive remark, the aftermath however, she couldn’t possibly have anticipated. Have a look at the tweet for yourselves;

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Sacco posted the tweet right before her flight to Africa. When her plane took off, all was well. She had a job and about 150 Twitter followers. When she landed about 8 hours later, her tweet was the number 1 trending tweet in the world, she had thousands of followers, she was receiving threats and in danger of losing her job. She was ultimately fired. She apologized but there was no fixing the social media spiral this tweet caused. (To read more about Sacco’s tweet click here.)

Though this may be an extreme case and not all of us are this foolish, it just goes to show how something you expect your few friends and followers to see can go global and up heave your whole world as you know it. It can have a lasting affect. You need to be aware of the scale of social media and the reach it has. Think of the possible consequences of what you are about to post before you do.

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The Chicago Tribune wrote a list or the top social media fails of 2013, click here to have a look through them. 

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