Social media background checks are gaining prevalence in the modern world of applicant screening from college admissions boards to employers at major corporations. While the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) isn’t so sure about the ethicality of social media background checks, they have still become commonplace for many companies and organizations throughout the United States.
In other words, if you are applying for college and/or hunting for a new job, chances are good that your prospective educational institution and employers are going to investigate your social media profiles. Where traditional background checks are generally instituted to look into the criminal histories, educational background, and experience of applicants, social media background checks investigate a different set of criteria. While unsavory social findings may not seem like they would have the same stakes as a major criminal conviction for schools and employers, they can still have the same ultimate result, which is losing your chance at the college acceptance and/or job you are seeking.
Luckily, your social media profiles are easier to clean up than any criminal history you may have. By viewing your Facebook profile, Twitter feed, LinkedIn page, Instagram page, blog, Flickr photostream, and other social media formats as extensions of your resume, and your college or job application, you can build your social media profiles and posts into resources that position you as the perfect candidate rather than unflattering posts that can potentially shatter a potential school or employer’s positive image of you.
In order to do this, you merely need to know what colleges and employers are looking for when conducting their social media background checks.
To get started in making sure your social media profiles shed a positive light on you, consider the following:
1. Watch Your Statuses and Comments: When employers browse your Facebook or Twitter pages, they look at the kinds of comments and statuses you have made in order to get a better sense of your online behavior. The theory is that, while you try to present yourself in a very favorable light during interviews, social media behavior can give prospective colleges and employers an idea of who you really are outside of school and work. Profanity, complaints about former teachers, schools, or employers, or comments with a sexist, racist, or otherwise discriminatory connotation are all social media red flags that may cause colleges and employers to reconsider you as a competitive applicant.
2. Look Through Your Photos: Photographic proof of lewd or reckless behavior can be a huge turn off for schools and employers when it comes to assessing their applicants. Facebook photos depicting drug use, excessive alcohol consumption, full or partial nudity, vandalism, or any other destructive or illegal activities will cast you as a reckless partier rather than as a serious student or seasoned professional. Questionable photographs on social media sites are an especially large problem for recent graduates looking to gain college acceptance, or to break into the job market.
3. Trim Down Your Groups, Likes, or Apps: Are you a passionate Farmville player? Do you list “Alcohol” as one of your interests? These are just a few of the behaviors that colleges and employers might not want to see from their applicants. Social media games aren’t necessarily a turn off for employers; however, someone who spends their days playing Farmville or Candy Crush on Facebook doesn’t always appear to be the most professional choice for a prospective student or job.
4. Consider Amending Your Friends List: Most colleges and employers won’t care too much if you have a couple thousand friends on Facebook; however, it’s never a bad idea to go through your friends list and trim it down to only the people you know well and frequently communicate with. If there’s a friend on social media who you think could make you look bad by either by posting obnoxious things on your wall or tagging you in inappropriate photos, it is a good idea to put that social media friendship on hold for now.
5. Check Your Blogs: Whether you’ve blogged on Facebook or on a separate website, read through your posts to see how they make you come across to others. Some blog writing can be professional, thoughtful, and perhaps even a boost to your college acceptance employment chances; and, these blog posts will be good to keep. Other blog writing can be petty, profane, and immature; and, when this is the case, you will want to delete or return these blog posts to draft status.
6. Look at Your YouTube Account: Many people forget about YouTube when cleaning up their online presence; however, if you’ve been a frequent video poster at any point in your time spent online, it’s worth a look. In most cases, YouTube videos are harmless; but, if you’ve ever uploaded anything that that could be considered offensive or anything that infringes a copyright, take it down just to be safe.
7. Restrict Tagging: One of the reasons that Facebook, in particular, represents such a threat to your chances of of college acceptance or getting hired is that it is unpredictable when tagging is involved. Even after you’ve cleaned your profile, you never know when a friend is going to tag you in a comment or photo that casts you in a questionable light. By adjusting your privacy settings so that you can review all tags before they show up on your profile, you can have better control of the story your Facebook profile is telling the world.
8. Set Your Profile to Private: If you absolutely don’t want your future college and employers looking at your social media profiles, then get to work making everything as private as possible. Twitter is inherently a public social networking site, and LinkedIn is a place where you should want to be found by potential college and employers. Facebook, on the other hand, makes it possible for users to set safeguards for their privacy. That way, certain profile elements, such as photographs, statuses, groups, and pages liked, can be kept invisible to non-friends; and, since most college acceptance committess and potential employers won’t be friends with you on Facebook when considering your application, privacy settings can be a good way for you to privatize your private live from those prying eyes.
9. Set Your Albums to Private: Alternatively, if you don’t want to entirely shut potential colleges or employers out of your social media world, you can tailor your privacy settings to allow non-friends access to only specific parts of your profile. In other words, you can show off your statuses and info, but restrict access to your photo albums. Although it's not completely private, this generally serves as a good compromise, especially if most of your unflattering social media actions are contained to your photos.
Of course, if you have photos that you absolutely don’t want potential colleges and employers to see, it’s best to take them down. You might even consider adopting a “no photos” policy on Facebook, and resort to storing your photo albums on another cloud-based service that sees less traffic from potential employers.
10. Match Your LinkedIn Profile to Your Resume…and Vice Versa: Make sure your LinkedIn profile is up-to-date and accurate in relation to your resume. If you are presenting different information between the two resources, potential colleges and employers will red flag your application. Synchronize all of your information, and work to make LinkedIn a place for colleges and employers to learn more about your educational and work history.
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