Social media can be fun for people to connect with friends and family but it can also be a bad thing when you are searching for a job.
Yes people might like the daily cat videos that you might post on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms but do you really think about who else could be seeing it. Most of the time when you are applying for a job the employer will search you up on google and see what kind of stuff you are posting on your Facebook. If you are posting pictures of you and your family at the beach enjoying a nice day then you should be fine when you are searched, but if you are posting videos of you drinking four beers at one time then maybe that might affect the way that someone perceives you when they are thinking about hiring you.
Kelsey Currie from the Career services office at Fanshawe College says “when you are posting things on social media you should always think…would my grandparents want to see this and not be totally offended by it”. What she means by this is that your grandparents probably don’t care much about the bars that you frequent on a daily basis but if you are going to post pictures of Canada’s Wonderland then that would be fine.
More and more, different places of work are getting into the social media game as they are trying to brand themselves and let more people find out about their place. So if you are able to use Twitter and Facebook as a professional tool then that could help you and not hurt you when you are looking for a job. Kelsey says “some employers want to see if you can use social media so they will post jobs on there and if you can navigate through Twitter and find that job and bring it up to them then that could help you in the end.”
She also recommends that people use Linkedin to get connected with the people that they might be getting jobs from in the future. It is a great tool as long as once again you use it professionally as it is an online resume that employers might look at when they are looking at you for an interview.
Social media can be good but it can also be bad when you are looking for careers but as long as you are using it properly then you should have no problem whatsoever.
