Social media has turned many of us into experts on online impression management: we understand intuitively how to modify our appearances and messages in order to appear more attractive, get more attention, more “likes,” more followers.
If you’re looking for a job (or considering looking for one in the future), you need to use these impression management skills while taking the perspectives of potential employers.
The University of Alabama’s Dr. Elliot Panek offers some suggestions:
- Recognize that what you need to convey in order to get followers on a social media site is not the same as what you need in order to appear to be a better job candidate (in fact, it’s often the exact opposite.). Employers want to know what kind of employee you’ll be: are you dependable, diligent, creative, ambitious? The information they have to go on isn’t limited to what’s on your resume, the handful of references you’ve listed or your performance in an interview. Employers use Internet search and social media as new tools to help predict who the best job candidate will be.
- Think about how easily information about you can be found. There are relatively simple ways to make information you put out there harder (but not impossible) for employers to find: post anonymously or use a pseudonym or multiple pseudonyms; adjust the privacy settings on your social media accounts so that only people in your immediate network can see what you post; don’t tag pictures of yourself that you don’t want everyone, including employers, to see; go back and look at the pictures you’re tagged in and consider un-tagging yourself. You can still put information out there, but think about how easy or hard it would be for someone outside of your immediate circle to find.
- Google yourself on a regular basis. Log out of your social media accounts and try to find any of your social media accounts by searching for your name within various social media sites (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter).
- Don’t just think about the relationship between social media and employers in terms of risk. Consider it as an opportunity to show something about yourself that can’t be conveyed in a resume. Use publicly accessible blogs, personal websites, social media or online video accounts linked to your name to demonstrate how creative, ambitious and hard-working you are. Create something and show it to a professor, a career services counselor or someone in the industry in which you want to work. Ask them to critique it, and use that feedback to improve it.
- Update your online identities frequently. Your new self is not going to be your old self: you acquire new skills and new interests, and your job goals are likely to change, too. Consider your online identity to be a work in progress.
Panek is an assistant professor of telecommunications and film in UA’s College of Communication and Information Sciences.
