The Curse of Facebook (and Bebo)

A former colleague of mine in a London recruitment company has had a bad week. He had been representing a star candidate for quite some time. They had met on several occasions and had reached a decision about the types of job that the candidate wanted and the companies that he would like to work for. Over the course of four weeks the candidate met with a small number of companies and eventually decided to accept an offer from one, a prestigious consultancy firm. Everything was going swimmingly until they decided to do a little internet check on the candidate. A simple Google search brought up his Facebook page and with it hundreds of photo’s of the candidate ‘wasted’. To use an American phrase -he was ‘bombed’. In every photo! The client took one look at the page and decided that they didn’t want this individual working for them. It was a huge pity because his references were excellent, his work rate was top notch. But the client didn’t want someone representing them who behaved like that.


The truth is that there is a sizable proportion of the population who behave like that each and every weekend and it doesn’t prevent them from getting and holding down very good jobs. The difference between this candidate and the rest of the people who do this all the time is that he committed the cardinal sin of being indiscrete. It’s akin to what was said of Charles Stuart Parnell at the time of the Kitty O’Shea saga; his greatest crime wasn’t having a relationship with a married woman, it was getting caught.


The point is this – whilst Bebo and Facebook have revolutionized how we use the internet they can damage your reputation in a number of ways if you are not careful. Sure, your friends might know that you are the local embodiment of Stifler from American Pie, but prospective employers needn’t know. All of the leading social networking sites offer the facility to lock down your pages and to only make them available to friends or signed in members. If your social network of choice has that option, use it. In the job search there is no point having a first class honours degree and experience in a top class multinational if a potential employer can see embarrassing photographs of that weekend in Kilkenny just by searching on Google.