It is a college students responsibility to protect their online social networking accounts such as Facebook and Twitter. Companies are checking Facebook and Twitter accounts to find out more about a potential hire. College students need to be very careful when setting up and using personal accounts on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Companies, and the government are checking my space and facebook pages to see if an applicant is or was involved in parties and drinking.
College students: protect your twitter and facebook accounts
Here are a few options to protect yourself from being denied a job because of your facebook and twitter profile:
- Change your privacy settings so only your friends that you approve can see your profile and everything contained inside of it (pictures, wall, etc.). This will help protect prospective employers from seeing messages your friends write like “…we were so wasted the other night…” and friends tagging you drinking. Make sure you change your settings so friends cannot tag pictures of you on their profile.
- Remove all inappropriate pictures from your Facebook or Twitter account that you would not like a prospective employer to see.
- Don’t have an account on Facebook or Twitter- This is pretty obvious, but hard for some students to do.
Warning! Remove Inappropriate Items Now!
College students should know that pictures and inappropriate material should be removed from your profile as soon as possible. Search engines are able to (or soon will be able to) crawl your profile and your profile could show up if someone searches for you online.
Even after you remove inappropriate material from your profile prospective employers may still be able to view your profile as it was weeks or even months ago. Pages on the internet get cached (saved) and can be brought up even after the page no longer exists, so it is VERY IMPORTANT you remove inappropriate stuff from your profile ASAP!