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Posted on 01-03-2008

Your paper resume isn’t the only thing potential employers are looking at. Your life, your friends, your hobbies—if it’s on the Web, they can see it

What do most of us do when we fire up our browsers first thing in the morning? Chances are, apart from checking e-mail, we log in to social networking sites to check up on friends and acquaintances. This trend is more noticeable with the current generation of professionals, many of whom believe that e-mail is so last century. If you are in the age group of 15-30, when was the last time you had e-mailed a colleague to enquire whether he or she would be there at the office party this Friday?

As places to hang out, have fun and meet people from all over the world these Web sites are the online equivalent of the office water-cooler. Most of them offer features like writing short messages to friends, uploading pictures and videos and projecting a unique identity by customising profiles. Still other sites focus exclusively on sharing photos and videos, and thereby aim at creating a community. In fact, we’ve covered these sites exhaustively in our Fast Track To The Social Web. What we haven’t talked about is their impact on individuals, and the feeling of freedom they grant us. For every LinkedIn that could get you a job, there’s an Orkut that could result in your losing it.

Responsible Behaviour
With that freedom—to paraphrase the Indian Constitution—comes responsibility. And for a change, this responsibility is not towards society or the country—it’s towards you. In the laissez faire world of social networking, it’s almost too easy to go astray. With the absence of any accountability or the need to face people personally, users are tempted to spice up their profiles and adopt a completely different persona. Peer pressure also adds a lot to this multiple personality syndrome: after all, we all want to look great and have more friends or messages from the opposite sex. And if those people are good looking, you are guaranteed to be the talk of the campus and the heart of the party. In fact, there are sites where you can hire models to be in your friend profile: they will also message or scrap you with sentences that don’t look like they have been spewed by a chat bot. Choices are yours—the sky is the limit. You might even become an Internet celebrity based on a YouTube video: a case in point is Lonelygirl15, a “teenager” who posted a series of videos where she talks about her lonely life, and which were followed by millions of people as avidly as they would follow a blockbuster TV show. That she was later revealed to be an actress and those videos were professionally shot is another matter.

The point is that people can draw erroneous conclusions based on your online presence—they say that on the Internet, a dog could be a man, and nobody would know. The reverse is also unfortunately true. The Web is a biased judge, jury and executioner all rolled into one. For example, not so long ago the gruesome pictures of Nicole Castouras, a young girl killed in a high speed crash were leaked by officers of the California Highway Patrol. Those pictures eventually appeared in more than 1600 Web sites and made life hell for the Castouras family, who had to repeatedly endure the sick photographs of their daughter’s decapitated body posted on these sites and also mailed to them, some accompanied by comments which insinuated that she got what she deserved.

First impressions are incredibly hard to dispel, and “sensitive”
keywords always raise warning flags in minds of prospective
employers and partners

Many A Slip
It doesn’t take gruesome accident pictures to ruin your reputation and peace of mind. Your Orkut profile is just as effective. Think about it: while you are in the race to impress your peers by snagging the most number of female friends and updating fake photos which show you off as über-cool, there are some other people out there that would possibly take a dim view of this whole scenario. One group is your family; another group is potential and present employers. For the purpose of this article, let’s focus on the latter.
By default, profiles, photos, videos and such other badges of identity in most networks is public. They have to be—there is no point in slaving over your profile and leaving it to be seen by three friends. But there is a downside to all the attention-mongering: you can be searched for just as easily by people from whom you’d prefer to not know that side of your personality. Search engines accomplish this in seconds with a few carefully chosen keywords. General search engines like Google, as well as people search engines like Spock—which specifically crawl most social sites—throw up profile photos, interests, books you read, movies you saw and a hundred other details. Oh, and another thing: Google caches Web results for years. If you had led a wild life which was reflected in your older MySpace profile and posted a few NSFW (Not Safe For Work) photos, be assured that someone will still be able to access it even after you became respectable and deleted them.

We’d guess you don’t want your boss to see this

Since it is always better to show than talk, we fired up Spock. Here you can search for persons by name and/or e-mail ID, while more advanced search options let you narrow down the search by age, sex, location, tags and picture. We entered a few sufficiently generic names—we won’t mention the—and entered the tag “sex”. A second later, the whole page was full of profiles where the “sex” word was either in a TV show or in the name of a movie or a book they recently saw or read. Later in the page, we hit paydirt: people who’ve put “likes sex” (along with books, movies and what not) on their profiles. Oops! While we won’t be judgemental, and wish them the best of luck, we can bet that when any of them walks into a room with a Web 2.0-savvy interviever, their applications will be looked at with at least one raised eyebrow.

With companies starting their official blogs, this medium
has gained some acceptance in the workplace

Employees In Sights
That’s actually sad, because many of them might have made those profiles just for fun. But first impressions are incredibly hard to dispel and such keywords always raise warning flags in minds of prospective employers and partners. Videos and photographs can also get out of hand pretty fast and become viral. While job oriented Web sites allow candidates to post video resumes of themselves, putting irrelevant material there would risk your present and future job prospects, especially if it showed off your tap dancing skills with a half naked partner, and if it ever got popular on YouTube. As a candidate, we always research prospective employers, looking not only at financial reports but also how good the work environment is. It stands to reason that employers would also check not only our academic background, but also our social background as reflected in such sites. As Ulhas Aher, HR Head of Datacraft—a unified communication solution provider says—“I have used sites like Orkut and LinkedIn for recruitment purposes. The candidates express their likes and dislikes which is a representation of their character. These sites are also great for serving up sources of unbiased reference”.

If the “worst boss ever” read this, they’d end the posters’ misery rather quick, we’d say

These checks continue even after the candidate is hired. A search on Orkut would easily bring up several communities dedicated to corporations, large or small. These communities are informally monitored by interested managers to get a feel of what employees think about their workplace. Preferring to remain anonymous, an HR executive in an MNC based in Hyderabad confirmed this trend, “Our department keeps an eye on these communities and if they see something objectionable, often contacts the immediate superior of the concerned employee. Depending on the comment, appropriate action might be taken. We also unofficially check the profiles of new hires: even my profile was checked out by my boss before I was hired.” While cases of firing a person based on his comments about the boss’s paunch or the company cafeteria are not heard of, there is every possibility that such disclosures would be viewed dimly and harm inter office relationships.

To Blog, Or Not To Blog?
Blogs are another potential landmine in the context of work life balance. They started off as personal journals where people talk about anything they want to—in some cases, that might also be about work: problems with colleagues and superiors, new things that are happening at the office, criticism of policies and so on. While this is all very well on pen and paper in a private place, they are a strict no-no in public places like blogs. Just ask Matthew Brown, who was given the pink slip by Starbucks for criticising his boss on his personal blog!

With companies starting their official blogs, this medium has attained a modicum of official acceptance. Official blogging, though, is another no man’s land without historical precedence. While corporate blogs aim to project an image of the organisation that is different from the image projected by press releases or PR agencies, quite often there are misunderstandings where individual bloggers might inadvertently or maliciously show the company in poor light. Not many have an official blogging policy or official bloggers, which leads to incidents like the furore raised when a Google employee commented negatively about Sicko (Michael Moore’s documentary on healthcare) on the Google Health Advertising Blog (http://google-health-ads.blogspot.com/ 2007/06/does-negative-press-make-you-sicko.html) , thus imparting an official slant to her personal opinion. There have been other cases where people have been fined, demoted or fired for leaking company secrets on such blogs.

Netiquette 2.0
As we have e-mail etiquette and social etiquette, there is a crying need to develop a set of conventions where social networking is concerned. The rule of thumb while you use Web 2.0 is: ask yourself if what you have intended to be seen by friends can also be shown to your boss. If the answer is no, don’t post it—your boss might see it anyway. Social sites like Facebook have privacy controls where you can make your profile viewable only to a select group of people: use them, and even then refrain from keeping a half-naked picture as your profile photo. Don’t use the e-mail ID which appears in your official communications. When blogging, don’t talk about controversial topics related to work and keep your blog profile temperate. You also need to be careful of what friends are saying about you. As in school, you are known by the company you keep on the Internet too. Be careful in posing for photos in say, a beer party or a strip club and request your friends to remove such photos from their profiles. You might come across as a party pooper, but that’s better than generating negative impression on an interviewer’s mind and losing that dream job. Even if you aren’t affected now by the exuberant description of how you streaked across the campus in your second semester, these things might haunt you when you are applying for top management positions. It didn’t affect George Crump, allegedly the world’s first streaker from becoming a Congressmen and an Ambassador to Chile because, you see, way back in 1804, there was no Internet.

Then, there is always the danger that someone (a business rival or resentful ex) might create a fake profile on social sites and fill it with provocative details that make you seem like a nymphomaniac or a Casanova (as the case may be). In fact, cases like this related to Orkut have been reported in the Indian media ad nauseum. In such cases the affected parties might have to take legal measures to salvage their reputation; the best course to adopt is always discretion, caution and constant vigilance.
You never know who’s watching you in cyberspace.