This is silly. Scratch that, it is stupid. Just because someone doesn’t use something, doesn’t mean they don’t understand it.
Skald:
I’d tell the young team leader that she has a very important less to learn.
Not everyone wants their life spread all over the internet for the whole world to see. This isn’t because they have something to hide. It is because they value their personal privacy. Privacy may not be something that she values, however, she is dumb if she believes that what she values is all that matters.
Besides the security risks associated with social media (which I imagine your team leader doesn’t know much about. Ask her if she posts on FB/Twitter/Whatever when she is going out. If she says yes, ask her why she would want to advertise the fact that her home is empty and ready to be robbed to the world.), some people spend spare time away from computers and phones. They are time sinks and some people find that getting away from computers/phones when not working opens up time to spend with family and friends. For example, my wife and I recently decided that we were spending too much time looking at our phones instead of talking to each other when we are at home. So the phones/tablets are banished to the chargers when we are together. Additionally, we try not to post Happy Birthdays and the like to FB, and instead either call or visit the person and do that really old fashioned thing, talk.
I have a LinkedIn account, and my wife and I share a FB account. I have the LinkedIn mainly to stay in touch with vendors that I have worked with in the past. The FB account is private, for family and friends and does not show up in google searches using my name or my wifes name. I routinely do google searches on our names to ensure that nothing damaging, embarrassing or wrong is attached to our names.
I am a network guy. I build them and manage them for a living. I understand how powerful they are and also understand how damaging they can be. I’ve been working on network stuff for a long time. My second job was at AOL way back in the 90s and I handled tons of calls a manager dealing with stalking, harassment and all kinds of other nasty things. Part of being on the internet is securing your activity so that it does not come back and bite you. Advertising oneself and every aspect of ones life for the world to see is stupid. My footprint, that can be traced directly back to me, is rather small. And I want it that way.
If I were her boss she would get a stern verbal thrashing. It’d start on privacy, run to possible lawsuits due to her behavior and end up with a ‘do that again and you’ll be fired’.
I didn’t read all of the replies, just responding to the OP.
Yes, I do check for an online presence. No online presence is not a bad thing to me - some people just aren’t in to it. Someone who does have an online presence that is poor or gives major red flags (i.e. public FB profile has derogatory posts about current boss/job, etc.) is a bad thing, and I probably wouldn’t call them for an interview.
P.S. I check them out online after they’ve been screened in to the ‘interview’ pile, but before we call for the first interview.
An Inside Sales rep needs to know how to use LinkedIn - it is one of the most important tools in researching accounts (we pay for Premium for our sales team).
Resumes are checked against LinkedIn - and I usually print out a candidates LI profile to compare to what they submit to us.
I have no issue with a private Facebook page, and unless you are a “name” - I don’t care about Twitter. I maintain a professional Twitter account that I use in business. It does NOT get photos of my dinner or comments about a party unless it is a party sponsored by a customer or partner (shots of me at Green Day with my PR team during Dreamforce for example).
LinkedIn, however, I expect you to use if you join my sales or marketing organizations. If you are just out of college, then I will cut you some slack.
That an active social-network presence is sort of a basic expectation of “normality” is one I cannot really share. It’s like people wondering why have you never married by the time you’re [insert age here]. I would not bat an eyelash at an applicant over 50 not even having a social-media presence at all if it’s irrelevant to his work.
BTW, a few states have started to legislate that employers cannot make you give them privileged access to your personal social media accounts – because some were doing so to get around privacy barriers.
For official employment and professional purposes I have realistic e-mails with noncutesy names. I have a bare bones presence in LinkedIn for maintaining professional contacts and in Facebook for personal ones, but no Twitter, no Instagram, no Google+ or such. Hell, I don’t even have my LI, FB or e-mail set to push. I’ve several passwords into the Googleverse (through accretion of gmail, YouTube and other previously distinct services) but all of them I’ve set to require deliberate login every time and none stays connected after I’m done there. For people who do know me it’s trivial to track my JRDelirious identity back to the “real me” so that’s my 'nym (with some variations) for respectable places like the Dope or TripAdvisor or some Webcomics. I have, of course, other 'nyms and e-mails for other uses.
A search for myself by my pretty common (for my ethnicity) real name brings up several different pro sportsmen, foreign politicians, various bloggers; two criminals in Florida including one RSO :eek:and one that makes that dude look boring:eek::eek:; and a music video creator in the first few pages. My LinkedIn and Facebook presence, and my official-business e-mail identities, are not even in the first two pages. JRDelirious and its variants do show up quickly as mostly TripAdvisor and SDMB, but also kicked up some archived really, really old USENET posts and a 5 year old PhotoBucket.
I’ve never seen anyone embrace their own irrelevance as enthusiastically as people on this thread (not the people who don’t use FB, but the people saying that young people use FB, therefore it’s worthless).
That sounds like someone who is more concerned about interviewing Right than about spending the interview time usefully.
Using a non-Google search engine (so I don’t get tailored results), none of the at least six living people on the first two pages are me (though it does return the results of a LinkedIn search on my name, and that does include me).
I mention “living” because even a hiring manager who thinks looking at candidates’ social media profiles will yield anything pertinent can probably figure out that the obituaries are someone else.
(That said, my Twitter bio used to identify me as a “terrorist”, a reference to some official or other using that term to describe people who retweeted support for Occupy, and I took that out because would-be employers. It still identifies me as a Teeming Millionth, though.)
Just noticed this. This guy stole this tactic from Admiral Rickover, the head of the US nuclear submarine fleet. I know a guy who was in the Navy on nuclear subs who claimed this happened to him, but I’m not too certain he actually had lunch with Rickover (being rather junior.)
To those who check social media before hiring, and those who manage them (looking at you, Skald), please listen to the voices saying you are (to mix metaphores) opening a Pandora’s Box that will bite you in the ass! See any of the below: American Bar Assoc Fast Company Society for Human Resource Management Monster.com
All recommend, at minimum, that someone outside the hiring process do the research, strip away any protected information and pass only legally allowed information to the interviewer. Good advice, please take it.
Online retailers have a problem. They have no way of knowing if a user is a real human with a real bank account or is a bot with a stolen credit card number. They could find a user who had registered and sent a bunch of money through their service would later be a fraud and the real owner of the card would reverse the charges. Merchants were pissed, credit card companies were pissed. Enter a little company called Fraud Sciences and the service they call “identity proofing.”
So Benchmark, one of the founding investors of eBay(parent company of PayPal) decided to test the company. Here I’m going to paraphrase the chapter titled “Persistence” of the book Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle(Google Books link which takes you to the paraphrased section). Benchmark contacted PayPal’s top fraud prevention expert and asked them to vet Fraud Sciences before Benchmark would invest in them. Scott Thompson had been a fraud prevention specialist at PayPal and at Visa before that. He put together a dossier of ~40k transactional details, which had been processed via PayPal, some of which were bots/fraudsters and some of which were real. These had been scrubbed of personally identifiable data, to avoid compromising PayPal’s customers, so that would make the Israeli firm’s job harder. They expected Fraud Sciences to take months to process the data, because PayPal was the best in the business and that’s how long it would have taken them. PayPal transmitted the dossier on Thursday. They got it back on Sunday. Fraud Sciences had not only been better at correctly identifying the fraudulent transactions, but they had less false negatives than PayPal had too. People who were good credit risks that PayPal had turned down, Fraud Services would have approved.
Thompson estimated Fraud Services was five years ahead of PayPal in the area of fraud detection/prevention, and roughly fifteen years ahead of Visa. He went straight to eBay CEO Meg Whitman and said that instead of recommending Benchmark invest in the company, he was recommending eBay buy them, immediately, and bring this technology in-house. They estimated the value of the company at ~70 million. Ultimately eBay paid $169 million for the company in 2008.
What Fraud Sciences did in 2006 is pretty similar to what your hiring manager is doing today, except today the “footprints” are most likely to be in social media. Insulating yourself against risk of people not being who they say they are is perfectly reasonable when you’re hiring someone. Apartments don’t lease to people without credit histories. Banks don’t loan to people without verifiable income. Sales is about making that personal connection and why not expect people who are good at making those kinds of connections to have social media presences?
Hell, I live under a rock and even I have a LinkedIn account.
What was her rationale for the idea that lack of social media presence would adversely affect them from becoming successful employees? If you didn’t ask then you haven’t done your due diligence.
It is common for companies to run a background check on potential employees, to verify work and education history. That is a lot more reliable than a social media check. Your example is checking for people who don’t really exist, but the potential employee is right in front of you.
I work for a multi-billion dollar multinational. I look up every “pre-qualified” resume that I get from HR on LinkedIn as does every other hiring manager I know. It’s the simplest way to find out if the resume has been “tailored” to the job description to an extreme extent.
The thing about LinkedIn is that your current employer will notice if you claim to have been solely responsible for improving sales by 40% when you basically just processed the orders. Your classmates from Podunk State University will be wondering how you got a degree from Duke at the same time. Since most companies do not allow managers to give references or HR to confirm anything except dates of employment and final salary, looking at a LinkedIn page seems the least you can do. The number if times I have found that the LinkedIn profile doesn’t come close to matching the resume is still frightening.
Two of my colleagues back in the 1990s claimed to be graduates of University of Kansas and University of Missouri. Now I look at their LinkedIn pages and they have listed Emporia State and Southeast Missouri State. These are guys who were making a quarter million or more a year in several jobs, and no one did a background check thorough enough to discover that they hadn’t gone to the colleges they claimed. We certainly hire people for 100k+ jobs all the time without anything more than a criminal background and credit check. The references never say anything negative, ever.
When I join a new project I look up everyone on the team, internal and consultants. Pretty much everyone checks me out too. I haven’t run into a person yet who didn’t have a LinkedIn page in probably 200, maybe 300 tries.
Interesting that they were successful employees without having gone to prestigious universities, and that if they were truthful about their education, would have never been (successful) employees.
One of them was fired for fiddling his commissions account. The other was fired for attempting to bribe a public official. The first guy also closed a big deal on very favorable terms with a major customer, then hired the decision maker on a no-show job. The customer sued us, and we lost a boatload.
But you know what we said when people called for a reference. Confirmed start date, end date and ending salary.
If you are willing to lie to get a job, will you lie to keep it, to get promoted, to get bigger bonuses? Will you lie to customers, bribe inspectors, falsify records? In some companies those are valued traits. Other companies don’t want you there. If you went to Podunk State University, you are going to need to prove you are just as good as someone who went to the flagship school. Printing up a fake diploma is not the way to go about “leveling the playing field”.
I have graduate degrees from a top tier school (top 10 in Engineering), a second tier school (50-100) and a third tier one (an urban commuter school that was night student friendly). There is a HUGE difference between the level of work required in each. I was top of my class in two schools, and could barely keep up with the class in one.
Wow, I thought this Huffington Post article from earlier this week was bullshit, but I guess there really are people who do and feel exactly what the article claims.
