I would think it could do, depending on the job. In recent years, I’ve only been involved in a small number of job searches, where any serious contender would need to be well established in the profession. I did some Internet searching to find out a bit about them, and often found personal stuff as well as professional (e.g., that one was an enthusiastic supporter of a particular football team).
Of course, being a football fan was neither here nor there as far as the decision went – he did get the job – but I can imagine going to a Facebook page, and finding that linked to nude self-portraits, might not help you get a lot of jobs.
I always google people before I have to interview them, and I’m particularly interested in what I find on their myspace/facebook/twitter pages. Some of the stuff I’ve seen has caused me to toss out a resume and not consider bringing that person in.
But I think what the OP is referring to is not that sort of nonsense, but a situation where someone’s nude picture is disseminated by a third party. So, for example, if I googled Jane Doe and found a nude picture of her on her ex-boyfriend’s page. Not sure… that’s a whole different kettle of fish.
Yes and no, I think it’s more likely to 'cause you a potential job than a current one.
Some jobs have “morals clauses” but those are usually high profile jobs, or jobs with public images.
The problem with doing the Google search is it’s way too easy to set someone up. As for naked pics, please I see people in the locker room of my gym, “talking” on their cells. I’m amazed how many of these chats seem to take place in front of the path to the showers.
It’s so easy to start a myspace page about someone and screw them over, especially if you’re a jilted lover or still have some kind of connection with that person. For example if you still work with a person you once dated and know he’s looking for a job. You can build a bad myspace page, and take it on and off line depending on what you hear from that person
This fascinates me, because it opens a whole set of problems that I wouldn’t have been able to deal with, if the internet had existed when I was young. But today,almost all kids/teenagers have a personal page,or lots of easily-to-find info about their “private” lives.
And almost all kids/teens do lots of stupid things.
For most of human history, that’s been fine, because stupid kid stuff was temporary, and remained private. But now it’s permanent, and public.
The internet has been a routine part of life for a decade now.That’s an entire generation of adolescents who began using Myspace/Facebook, etc during the “stupid” period of their lives, but are now adults and have to face the consequences.
A couple questions for all you 20-somethings out there: Do you care? Do you often regret what you posted when you were 16? Have you learned from it? (i.e. Do you try to teach your younger brother to be more careful?)
These sorts of questions generally belong in In My Humble Opinion. Not to worry. I’ll move it there for you. Moved from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
I have always worked with children. In my previous job, I think there’s a high possibility that such a thing could have gotten me fired. In my current job, they warned us in training to be cautious about the kind of things we post on public pages such as MySpace or FaceBook. They didn’t say, “We’ll fire you for naked pics,” but the implication was that we better not do such a thing.
Funny that you mention this as I just read an article in yesterday’s Washington Post about a vice-principal who got called onto the carpet as he tried to track down an incident of ‘sexting’ that involved students from his school.
While he didn’t lose his job, the guy was arrested, had charges brought against him and was wrung through quite an ordeal in trying to proclaim his innocence.
The article is one-sided –obviously since it’s written by the vice-principal himself- and there were a few missteps on his part that would eventually prove costly but it is a cautionary tale to be sure.
But I’ll take that into account… if a college kid has pictures of himself drinking beer at a party, so what? If he recounts getting drunk every night and not bothering to attend classes, that’s a different story.
On the other hand, I do worry about a generation of people who see no distinction between private life and public. If you feel the need to brag about how much you love smoking pot and pirating movies on your facebook page, why shouldn’t I consider that when I’m considering whether to hire you?
That’s sort of it. If I have two candidates I’m trying to decide between, and a google search of one shows little information - or very positive information - and the other one turns up a lot of pictures of that person out partying, a personal life strewn with messy love affairs and the drama associated with them - I might feel that the first candidate is less likely to bring drama into the office and call in “sick” less - it may not turn out to be a correct bet, but its probably a good one.
These days having a crazy myspace page can get you not even considered for a job so yeah, nakey pictures floating around are not advisable. Everyone does the Googlestalk. Potential employers and potential dates. You have to be aware of what’s out there. I took everything down except my LinkedIn and a nominal Friendster page so potential employers can see what I look like. It has one picture on it.
I’ve thrown around putting my Facebook up after I get into business school but at this point I’m seriously against it. When it was up the only thing I ever did was stalk people from my past and compare my career with theirs and was stalked in return, most likely for the same reason. The only advantage was reconnecting with friends. My experience has been that it basically functions as a time suck and e-stalking tool.
It doesn’t take much to get fired, if you do something that even halfway embarasses your boss.
Back in my radio days, we had a promotion where we’d drive around and give people money if they had our bumper sticker on their cars. One day we stopped the car of an employee of a competitor’s station. We thought it was funny, she thought it was funny; as soon as we announced her name on the air, her boss fired her for driving around with a competitor’s bumper sticker.
You’re a representative of your employer and, as such, you should have your employer’s best interests in mind. A nude photo of yourself, whether taken before or after your date of hire, may or may not jive with how your employer wants to be represented.
OK - I think it’s pretty well established that potential employers do indeed look at MySpace and Facebook, and may indeed eliminate candidates if they find something unsavory.
Given that these pages are under the control of the individual, leaving questionable content on them while applying for jobs shows a double dose of bad judgment, and I can understand how it would make an employer think twice.
So let me narrow the question: The scenario described in the editorial I linked in my OP primarily concerns cell phone text messages. Say a teenage girl snaps a photo of herself pulling up her shirt and foolishly sends it to her boyfriend’s phone, intended for his eyes only. The boyfriend (a teenage boy and therefore an idiot) forwards it to all his buddies, one or more of whom, thinking it would be hilarious to do so, post it on their own pages, or elsewhere on the web to some blog site or another. Let’s even go a step further and say they tag it with the girl’s full name to make it searchable.
Meanwhile, the girl’s own personal pages are clean and embarrassment-free. So how much does this one indiscreet photo come back to haunt her? How many layers deep are you looking when you Google people you might or might not hire? And, is anyone out there involved in the college selection process? Considering the number of kids applying to any given school, this degree of scrutiny seems impractical.
Again, I don’t advocate this sort of behavior, but the dire warnings sometimes strike me as the modern equivalent of “don’t cross your eyes or they’ll get stuck like that.”
The thing is, Wheelz, an employer (or potential employer) is probably not going to be all that interested in tracking down the method by which a naked picture (or other embarassing item) made it to the World Wide Web. If it’s there, and a cursory Google search can locate it, then the reaction will most likely be “Huh. /deposit resume in trash”.
It’s kind of a yes/no query, really. The question being “Does a cursory Googling turn up anything embarassing or potentially embarassing?”. If the answer is “yes”, mostly people just flat aren’t going to care what the story is. There are going to be plenty of other candidates for whom the answer is “no”.
Consider that it probably takes less time to Google someone up than it does to read and evaluate an entrance essay, for example. It also probably takes less time (and is more convenient) to Google someone than to call and check their references.
Would that have been true for somebody who lived in the same small town their entire life? I think that having the stupid kid stuff be temporary and private may be a historical anomaly that is coming to an end.
I work very, very hard to make sure no-one knows who I am in real life. Granted, given the amount of info I’ve given over time, someone could probably track me down, but it would take a lot of effort, and still be rather difficult. I don’t want that to change, so I’ve never used my real name, shown my picture, etc.
I also don’t think I do much stupid stuff, but given that my opinion will probably change on that in 10 years, I’m not qualified to talk about that :p.