One thing is clear: twenty first century technology is now integrating our lives quicker as we could have imagined not so long ago. Nowadays, electronic devices and digital apps have started to appear in our daily life without us noticing it. As if we were talking about Orwell’s older brother, that hears and sees everything, Internet has allowed us to control each other with an almost perfect accuracy. In a country such as Spain is, where half of the population owns an Smartphone, and whoever that does not own one, has a pc or a laptop instead. The World Wide Web has caught on us since the very first moment that we conceded the privileges of storing all our data, including pictures or interests, and to permit that other users could have access to all of it.
If we take all this into account, it is not crazy at all to define the Internet as a potential dangerous agent when it comes to using it as a way of searching for a job, moreover realizing that recruitment tendencies nowadays point into the direction to the huge possibilities that social networking brings in this context. A recent case study claims that at least 70% of job-seekers have tried to search job offers through social networks, and that in only two years time the frequency of use from human resources professionals using these networks to find candidates has increased by 10%, that can help us figure out the trend that will follow through the pass of time. What is clear is that these numbers are really revealing to just skip them, or to not set out the need of adapting our cybernetic identity to these new Internet uses.
To begin with it is important to be careful regarding the information that we have published in our social networks, focusing on LinkedIn and Facebook, which are the most used ones by recruiters. It is not enough to delete all the compromising pictures to clean out your social profile, that is a thing from the past decade. Now the caution go way beyond that. In order to keep a ‘normal’ and responsible image of ourselves (nobody is saying you don’t look like it, but, sometimes, we can maybe not look so) it is important to control our digital trace. Your digital trace is your Internet footprints, you maybe have an open profile in a social network that you have not used in ages or maybe your friends tag you in not so noble pictures,so you aren’t maybe able to scape the ‘all powerful Google’. Whatever the reason may be, it is necessary to track your trace, and to change anything that is needed. It is also obvious to say that grammar mistakes are not an option in a selection process, so make an emphasis of attention in correction any mistake of this kind!
We must also not forget that social networks nowadays have multiple applications, groups, etc, what basically means that every time you interact with an element inside that network, it remains registered in your profile. We tend to forget with the pass of time our group memberships, even ‘likes’ can be double-edged swords: you may have forgotten that you liked a picture of an agressive anti-system message posted by an university classmate, but there is still. The thing is that these are details that will remain in your profile and it is worth a few minutes time to go through if anything that appears in our profile is what we would like to show recruiters that would get to know us in our social networks, and that would get a first impression of us by them.
The last important thing is privacy and it is something that most of the people skip, but choosing the correct settings adequately can mean enjoying a life in peace while surfing through your social networks, without the fear of having your chances lowered in a selection process. Almost every social network brings the opportunity of restrict who can watch your steps, but in most of the cases, maybe because we just don’t know it or because we are lazy, we tend to leave with the default settings. It is important to remember that the correct privacy settings can be essential when you want to use social networks as a job search tool. If that is what we want, as we said before, to track you digital trace, modify anything you may not like and to join actively some groups, pages or any other element that provides you with visibility so the employer can notice you.
In conclusion, we just wanted to add up that what we have explained in the previous lines doesn’t mean that every candidate has something to hide from recruiters, but it is true that information means power, and knowing certain details of a person’s life without knowing the reasons behind of it can mean that we have a disrupted opinion of his or her interests and values. We must also know that is really beneficial to understand positively our social network presence, and we cannot forget that in the end anything that you may post can complement your CV, and you have the power on how to set this up.
So you know that now is the moment to restructure all your digital identity! Make your menaces into benefits and take use the Internet wisely and its advantages regarding the 2.0 Recruitment.
