Facebook and your mortgage
In May 2014, I took part in a conference at IE Business School in Madrid that I entitled “When Facebook decides whether you get a mortgage”. It was a provocative notion, but not one that is now that far from reality: the social network has applied for a patent that it says can assess somebody’s credit history on the basis of the number of friends they have.
Facebook’s move could simply be a defensive one, and given European and US law data protection law — not applicable in all countries, though — , and whether it will put Facebook users off sharing information (which the company doesn’t want to happen). Either way, these types of situations are happening more often, and not necessarily due to Facebook.
Facebook, by restricting access to its users’ profiles and differentiating them from users’ pages, protects them from the scrutiny they are subject to in other areas of their lives. In recent years, growing numbers of my students have told me they are worried that some data about themselves on social networks could be accessed by a future employee.
By now, we should all know that it’s not a good idea to behave like an idiot on the social networks: employers will look you up. But anonymity isn’t a good idea either: it gives the impression you’ve been living in a cave for the last decade, or hidden in a Unabomber style cabin in the woods; probably not the profile employers are looking for.
If you are an active user of the social networks, you’ll probably have expressed an opinion about something, and the person or company interviewing you may not share that opinion. Is it worth missing a job opportunity for sharing your views on something?
Or is it better for the world to know what you believe in? Would you want to work for an outfit that didn’t share your views? Again, there are ways of saying things: the more serious we are about the position we have taken, the more respect it will command.
We’ve moved on since the days when a snap taken at a party could threaten your job or position at college. But it’s probably not a good idea if you Facebook page is a litany of drunken parties…
Perhaps the best approach is to use your social network page as a place to store content: this is both useful for your work, and shows the world that you are serious about what you do. If you decide to start producing your own content, do make sure that it’s appropriate for the “audience” we’re most concerned about.
You might well ask if it’s worth using the social networks if all we’re going to do with them is project an image of the world that our employers or future employers will approve of. Perhaps instant messaging á la Snapchat provides the alternative, giving us an outlet to express ourselves without having to worry about something we said or did coming back to haunt us down the road.
I don’t know the answer. In my own case, I am fortunate to have a secure job, and am more concerned about the quality of my writing, regardless of the conclusions some might make about what I say.
In short, we cannot afford to ignore the social networks. Employers expect candidates to be using them, reflecting a good balance of professional and personal interests. And on the whole, this is how most young people use the social networks: gone are the days (mostly) of numbskulls who told their employer they were taking a day off sick, after having posted a photo of themselves at a party the night before. You will be judged by your employer on your ability to use the social networks to their fullest.
The social networks can be a great platform for personal branding, telling the world what you do, what interests you hold, and even protecting you in certain situations. Just apply common sense.
It’s about finding a balance between the extreme of Cardenal Richelieu’s disputed dictum about finding enough to hang a man in six lines, and being so wary that you don’t exist on the social networks, which employers will find strange in this day and age. That balance will come through the development of new protocols, value systems and habits, which are still very much in their infancy. There are no hard and fast rules about the “right” social network presence; there are any number of factors involved, and in the end it’s down to each of us to go with what feels right.
(En español, aquí)
