You’re searching for a new job — should you clean up your social media?
Your forgotten digital footprints could step on your job prospects
Digital decluttering
Coherently cleaning up one’s digital footprints is a task that people tend to find overwhelming. Theystruggle to recallwhat they have posted across multiple channels across many years, and avoid decluttering – reassuring themselves that they are boring and not worthy of others’ interest.
Some take broadbrush actions, such as deleting some or all of their social media accounts. Yet deletion is a luxury. Some of the young adults that we interviewed in our research felt compelled to be visible online via social media accounts while job-seeking – especially for white-collar jobs – so that potential employers could check them out.
Online visibility builds legitimacy. It presents an identity to the world – who we are, who we hang out with, our activities and opinions. Admittedly, that identity may be a sanitised version of the real person, carefully constructed with an online audience in mind, but so is a CV.
There can be ongoing tensions for job seekers between feeling they have to be visible online, and protecting their own safety. One of our interviewees, whose family had sought asylum in the UK, highlighted how asylum seekers could feel torn:
Similarly, survivors of domestic abuse may want to keep a low profile toavoid being foundby their abusers.
Decluttering is a painful, yet necessary aspect of entering the world of work. Google yourself. Get a friend of a friend to look you up online and see what they find. If you can, remove the content that surfaces which shows you in a bad light. If you are featured in content posted by others, ask them to take it down. Untag yourself. If all else fails, detach yourself from online connections who have tagged you at your worst, so that the content is not associated with you.
If there’s too much content that may harm your employment prospects, tighten your privacy settings so that potential employers can’t see it. If membership of a specific social media site is linked to a past that you no longer align with –- such as an OnlyFans account -– untag yourself and delete your account for good measure.
This article byWendy Moncur, Professor, Computer and Information Sciences,University of Strathclyde, is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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