Magic Pot of Jobs

With the economy struggling, many employers are finding that more people than ever are applying for available positions. This means that hiring managers are being overwhelmed by large piles of resumes. Employers also have to deal with budget cuts, which had made it more difficult to weed through applicants. As a result of less money to spend on things like background checks(click here), many hiring mangers are turning to the Internet to find out who applicants really are before they hand out job offers.

These informal background checks have been made easier by the increasing popularity of social networking sites and online communities. Since many people see the Internet as anonymous, even if their name is clearly visible, they often let their private side out online without thinking about who could see it. The problem with this is that, unless profiles are made private, sites like Myspace and Facebook have made it easy to simply search for someone’s information.

Several things in particular are turn-offs to hiring managers using this method to find out about job seekers. Pictures can often cause the most trouble. Many times, hiring mangers decide against a candidate because of images that are too sexual in nature, show the individual drunk or are drug related. Even if the picture was taken as a joke it can come across the wrong way to an employer who doesn’t know the full story behind the image.

Blogs can also get you into a lot of trouble. Those who express opinions that are or can be taken as extremist or intolerant in nature usually don’t get hired if a hiring manger happens to take the time to read what they have written. Since harassment and discrimination lawsuits are very serious and have a huge impact on business, this is easy to understand.

Admitting or referencing participation in anything violent or illegal will also have HR managers tossing your resume in the trashcan. Businesses can not afford to risk the danger of having their other employees around someone who is involved in anything of this nature. With office place theft costing so much money, those who admit to anything of the sort won’t be hired.

Some businesses will decide against an applicant based on the excessive use of foul language. Since this is consider offensive by many, few HR mangers want to have to deal with the trouble such unprofessional attitudes can cause.

Those who do not want to have worry about every little thing placed on their personal pages should consider changing their privacy settings so that only their friends have access to them. This can easily solve the problem altogether. If you do desire to have information that an employer can view that is not of such a private nature, some experts suggest creating a second, more professional profile.

Tags: Background checks

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 25th, 2009 at 10:07 pm and is filed under Job Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.