Social media: dangerous for students

Our digital footprint has the potential to damage our future careers, yet it is surprising how many of us still manage to make idiots of ourselves online. Students are especially guilty of being unaware of the extent to which employers investigate our private lives nowadays. A recent survey by Harris Interactive found that 37 per cent of UK employers use social media to research candidates, and a further 11 per cent stated that they intended to start doing so in the near future.

Paris Brown, 17, resigned as Youth police commissioner a matter of days after her appointment following the discovery that she posted messages on Twitter that condoned violence, mentioned her craving for hash brownies and called the Made in Chelsea cast ‘f****** fags’, amongst other things. Some people are even stupid enough to publicly rant about their jobs, with hashtags such as ‘#ihatemyboss’ being widely used on Twitter. Search ‘#ihatemyjob’ on the site and you can find thousands of people who could instantly be given their marching orders.

Not the cleverest of tweets…

Pretty tactless it is fair to say, but sometimes seemingly harmless online content can hold you back too. I recently heard of a student who lost a job opportunity after he posted on Facebook a picture of himself drinking a beer. In general, however, it is provocative photos, references to drunken antics, use of drugs, poor language skills and speaking ill of employers past and present that are the main things to cut down on.

What a fool

It is a rather worrying trend when you consider that in the future anyone in the limelight will have every detail of their online identity examined, and career after career could be destroyed by decades-old content. Social media is unfortunately not just a harmless bit of fun, and this level of scrutiny is something that we have to accept, whether you think it’s fair or not. Of course, you can just make your profiles private and more secure, but I wouldn’t bet against there still being ways of accessing such pages.

I wouldn’t if I were you, Mallorie

Although a profile clean-up is in order for most of us, there is no need to rid your online identity of personality. After all, employers are not just looking for warning signs; they are also looking for outgoing, sociable applicants and want to see if you would be a good fit in their organisation. Therefore, it is more a case of erring on the side of caution, toning down the outrageous and using common sense.

So before you go for that big job application it might be best to untag those pictures of you spewing outside Bunker and delete that tweet about how ‘wired’ you were last night. As we heard in the film The Social Network, “The Internet’s not written in pencil, it’s written in ink.”