Blog Post: What does your Facebook, Friendster or Myspace page say about you?

The days of recruiters relying solely on carefully crafted and typed text on a formal resume to get a first impression are nearly over. As someone who does a lot of recruiting, I'll almost always do an Internet search for a person's name before picking up the phone to see what I find. Let's be clear; it's not snooping, spying or prying into someone's personal life. It's researching publicly available data (often put online by the candidates themselves) to assist in making a responsible hiring decision.

Sometimes it's positive - I'll learn of impressive affiliations or community involvement. Other times I'll stumble upon a public profile on a social networking site that will make me reconsider picking up the phone at all, even when the resume looks great. Someone who appears on paper to be well educated and respectable will show up on a public web site with revealing photographs and journal entries filled with expletives and ghetto-speak.

The most unfortunate thing about this could be that the person's unprofessional and socially undesirable (from an employer's perspective) "web image" may be a lot farther from their true personality than the one that is apparent on the resume. For someone looking for work, this would be a steep price to pay for putting up a "front" or fantasized alter-ego on social networking web sites in order to impress peers or prospective romantic interests, or whoever the person feels they need to impress in this public way. This short sighted strategy makes them much less attractive to a prospective employer seeking a responsible and upstanding individual.

In my field, I am willing to cut my prospects a little more slack, because I know that Massage Therapists are highly independent, and free spirited. They often do not have (or do not want to have) experience in the corporate world, and therefore don't think about these kinds of things like someone coming out of business school with an MBA might. Still, there are limits to just how far I think it is wise for them to go, and whether their persona appears genuine or made up, it is all still useful information in getting a fuller picture of who they are and how they think.

Serious job seekers in all fields need to be smart and think carefully about what messages are being delivered via the web, especially on publicly available areas of social networking sites where photographs are posted.

Daniel Melmed

Body Well Massage Professionals

www.bodywelltherapy.com