Today’s post (the last in the job-related Facebook series) will help you to clean up your profile and make sure that your profile stands out (or at least makes a decent impression) to people (read: potential /current employers).
We post hundreds of pictures depicting us in all kinds of moods. While you may be under the impression that your pictures are being viewed by only your friends, there might be at least 100,000 other people who might be viewing every move of yours with great interest. Shocked?
In order to make sure that all your controversial posts and pictures are only accessible to your friends, you need to go to the Privacy Settings and then click on Profile Information and then enable the settings so only your friends can view your pics and posts instead of your friends and networks. The UF network on Facebook has over 95,000 people! Now, you can imagine how many people you accidentally gave access to.
If you are the kind of person who wants to use Facebook for networking purposes, then the two main aspects of your profile that you need to be careful about are your posts and pictures.
Click on your Profile->Info->Edit and then try and see if there are any movies, music, political opinions or even quotes that might be considered inappropriate from an employer’s point of view and go ahead and edit them. Do not associate yourself with groups and pages that have a racist or controversial or sexist connotation to them. Make sure that your profile information is well organized and without any typos.
Try to show a bit of your personality through your quotes and profile information. Learning that you are smart, well- read and funny will improve your impression among employers.
Then go on to the Photos tab and please go ahead and remove pictures that have you in a drunken stupor,wearing obnoxious outfits or racy costumes and contain objectionable comments. When it comes to your status messages, be sure to not include comments such as “I hate my current job/boss/co-workers” and basically anything that shows you as an insincere and a non-committed person.
I know a lot of you think Facebook is for fun and you need not worry about it so much but the point here is that, if you want to use Facebook as a tool to market yourself, you need to do it right. Several people have been careless about using Facebook and have lost their jobs, or failed to get one. Do not under-estimate the power of social networking – instead use it to your advantage!
