Social Media Could Ruin Your Next Interview (Not Clickbait)
Although the writing prompt I chose asks about social media in relation to the hiring / firing of tomorrow, I think that it already has made a significant impact on the hiring process of today. I’m sure many people under a certain age have gone through elementary and high school with their Facebook page active (probably at one point filled with those photos where you could tag your friends based on their accompanying Twilight character or whatever and maybe some of those notes where you could answer like 50 questions about yourselves or the classic “LMS for a TBH”, oh yeah and ask.fm, remember that?). Alongside that, most people probably also had a YouTube channel (possibly featuring covers of Coldplay songs, embarrassing short films about ninjas taking over the world in a UFO, lightsaber / Jedi practice, break-dancing, etc.), you know maybe even an edgy Tumblr or MySpace page (if we’re going way back).
What I’m trying to illustrate is that we all already have a digital footprint. There are already archives of our everyday activities / posts on these websites ranging back from when we activated our accounts, and we may not have thought it at the time, but maybe it’ll come back to haunt us. I know for a fact that many hiring managers at least attempt to locate and look through an applicant’s social media for various red flags that they may not have spotted during the interview; and if they find it, they can easily take a look into your real life, whatever that may be. Maybe you tweet at Adele non-stop, maybe you have a video of yourself throwing up while doing the cinnamon challenge or maybe you secretly make racist comments under a pseudonym Twitter account that’s unknowingly linked to your high school spam e-mail. It’s all out in the open for the hiring manager (tech savvy depending) to locate and further judge for themselves.
This concept reminded me a lot of the Black Mirror episode Nosedive. If our society continues to build upon our obsession with automation and social media a very possible (maybe not exactly to the same extent) outcome could be the reality displayed in Nosedive. In that episode we saw a society that essentially runs itself socially via a (pretty savage) social media platform. This reality includes the ability for anyone to view your profile at any point in time and then further rate you out of 5. So let’s say you’re in an important, nerve-wracking interview, the interviewer would have your entire social life on display and only a click away from any information they would ever want to know, while they’re looking directly at you irl. Doesn’t that seem a little backwards to you? I bet that realistically, a lot of jobs would not be offered, or even revoked in this reality just due to the importance and ever-presence of social media in their society.
And just to show you that we could be currently going in this direction, I pulled up some funny / infuriating articles about people getting fired after unfavourable information was uncovered from their social media accounts.
