As online recruitment is growing more and more commonplace among employers, so is the importance of the online reputation of the people applying for jobs.
Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter can hold a plethora of often brutally honest and uncensored information about candidates, which can work in their benefit, but most usually to their detriment.
Quick and easy checks of these sites by prospective employers have become standard parts of the recruitment process, so it is important for candidates to ensure that their online reputation matches that which they hope will snag them their new job.
“No demographic group leaves more digital breadcrumbs than younger people and graduates who have very exposed lives on the internet,” said internet recruitment expert, Geoff Newman from online recruitment specialist Recruitment Genius.
“As a generation who grew up with the internet they are much more comfortable with displaying their personal lives online and have a fundamentally different concept of privacy.”
Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said recently that young people may just start assuming new identities in order to circumvent problematic or childish online reputations they may have established through their youth. Newman said this may become the case, but believes that there is a strong possibility that the law of economics will leave companies caring less and less about the contents of a public, but obviously personal Facebook page.
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