Familiarity Breeds Contempt—Part II

 

In part one of this article, I discussed how familiarity can breed contempt and how teachers and other professionals should avoid giving out too much information about themselves, either in the course of normal conversation or on social networking sites.

 

In this installment, I am going to discuss how providing too much information to others can prevent you from getting that high-paying job you want.

 

In today’s economically trying times, employers are taking great care in performing background checks on the employees they hire and on some they have already employed.

 

Given the vast amount of information that can be gathered on the Internet and its cost-effectiveness in comparison to the potential cost of employing a risky employee, employers are able to perform extensive background checks on potential employees to weed out the undesirables.

 

Social networks such as MySpace and Facebook are prime targets for employers to search when considering a new hire. If an applicant has content or links involving subject matter that can reasonably identify him or her as a threat to workplace harmony and/or safety, such as swastikas, Confederate flags, pornography, glorification of guns, knives, or other weapons, or references to drug use or other illegal activities, then it is fair to use this information to make a hiring decision, to prevent possible future issues.

 

If an employer should hire an employee that was discovered to be into weapons or pornography, and that employee sexually harasses or threatens another employee, the victimized employee could sue the employer because the employer had knowledge of the new hire’s propensity towards the type of offense made.

 

Google is another great tool that employers have added to their toolbox. Who hasn’t “Googled” themselves at some point, eager to see if something interesting pops up? If you have not done that, then perhaps you should. You would be amazed at how much information there could be about you in a simple Google search.

 

Google’s mission statement is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Loosely translated, this means that Google intends to locate any information it can legally access about you and serve that information to anyone that searches for it. Therefore, it does not matter what social network you have posted your personal information on, or what site you use to host your blog, or which Internet News Group you post pictures on. Google will find them and organize them for any potential employer that cares to perform a simple search during your pre-employment check.

 

Personally, I use a feature on Google called Google Alerts to continually search for information about myself. This service allows me to configure a set of search terms about myself, my boss, a friend, or any other information for that matter. Once configured, Goggle will send me instant e-mails with the information it has found about one of my search terms.

 

I can assure you Google has a vast database of information. I once was sent an alert that Google located about an Internet conversation I had forgotten about long ago. It was a posting to a Usenet newsgroup I made in 1981 in which I was part of a conversation regarding co-founder of Apple Computers, Stephen Wozniak’s aircraft accident and how it would affect Apple Computers if he had died in that crash. Human memory is fleeting; the Internet remembers forever.

 

So, the next time you update your MySpace or Facebook site, look closely at it and ask yourself if you would be proud to hand out flyers containing the information on your site or in your blog to your current employer, future employer, or even your mother.

 

In short, Web savvy job seekers can just as easily use the medium of the Internet to boost their chances of landing that dream job as they can to destroy them.

 

In part three of this article, I will discuss a real world example of how providing too much information to others can severely limit your employment potential.