Need a Job? Fix up that Facebook.

In this day and age, you can’t simply walk into a job interview, show the interviewer your resume and grades from school, and expect to get the job. There are other things you should consider. Some companies and colleges are searching for their potential candidates online through Google and Yahoo, and they have even started looking on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Companies who have found something outrageous about an individual through social networking sites, have turned down many students. A student by the name of Tien Nguyen didn’t get any invitations for job interviews until he took down and satirical essay he wrote called “Lying your way to the top” that could be found when reasearching his name on Google. He responded by saying “I never really considered that employers would do something like that…I thought they would just look at your résumé and grades”. More on his story and others can be found in this New York Times article from June 2006. Even more cases are listed here.

So are companies and colleges stalking students? Shouldn’t profiles on social networks be part the student’s private life? Well, that’s the debate. If you are putting explicit stories about your sexual endeavors and pictures of yourself holding beer bottles for everyone on the internet to see, then why shouldn’t companies and colleges get involved? Social networking isn’t exactly new any more, but it is still something society has to get used to. If it’s there for the public to see, there will be consequences. We should all be more careful about what we post and write on the internet, because you never know how it will come back to haunt you.