Maybe this is just part of people growing out of that phase in their life. Most functional members of society, present company excluded, give that shit up and learn to conduct themselves in a more reserved manor when they finish college. Some a few years later than others. Some NEVER act this way. Rather than saying, 'accept the fact people will make pictures of themselves acting retarded available to the world,' look at this as something in response to balance it out (pretty soon people start throwing labels like 'alcoholic' and 'drunk' around). On this point though, in the next ten years will it be acceptable to walk into a job interview, throw your flip flopped feet up on the desk and say 'what the fuck up wit it vanilla face? I got the job up in dis motha fucka?'
Oh, absolutely... never said we were any different in that regard. When I was growing up, we didn't have cel phones, or home computers, or the internet, or digital cameras... so the shit we did went largely undocumented. Drinking and driving on dirt backroads, in an old Jeep CJ7, tossing beer bottles up in the air, and shooting them with a handgun? Check. Getting bored at a toga party and deciding to steal the Storybook Gardens (London, Ontario thing) Mississipi River style paddle boat at 2am, leaving it anchored in the middle of the Thames River? (One of our crew was the police chief's kid, so we knew the only police boat was in for repairs). And kept the steering wheel as a trophy? Check. Being chemistry geeks in high school and blowing up the plumbing on the last day of school by a coordinated flushing of nasty chemicals down toilets, causing over $100k of damage (in the early 80's, when $100k was a shit-load of cash)? Check. The really GOOD shit became stuff of legend, and was embellished a bit with every telling, making some things worse. But again, we did shit, and there was no video/photo proof of it, and we didn't put it online. For instance, what about those idiots a while ago that trashed a bunch of new homes, that video taped themselves doing it, and posted it onto YouTube? It's the same mentality. It may be a given, and understood that people do crazy shit every now and then, but that doesn't mean you should flaunt it or make it easily found, and expect no repercussions.
I never put anything on my facebook that I wouldn't want the entire world to know. It's that fucking easy. There's a lot of things on this mesageboard that I wouldn't want people in my real life to find out about. But none of them would ever be able to find out I'm a member here. The email I used to sign up here was redbullgreygoose@gmail.com which obviously isn't my real email. Even my XBOX live account which I very very occasionally use to play COD with board members is a second account. The only thing that I've let on about me here is that I live in both Miami and Tampa depending on what time of the year it is. I knew to do this shit ever since I knew how to use a computer. Anyone that doesn't deserves what they get. I remember one time when some kid posted something embarrassing on the old rmmb advice board and SLF changed the title to read "name" (does whatever) so that it would turn up in google searches. That's never happening to me.
I guess my point is that because everyone (and by everyone I mean anyone that got laid before age 25) has done some "wild and crazy" stuff, the notion that companies can hire "clean" employees is only as valid as the company's ability to remain ignorant of it. When you reach the point where 95%+ of your applicants have facebook profiles that show them drinking socially and bringing home the ugliest girl at the party, you'll be forced to reevaluate your priorities and criteria and start realizing that perhaps it's time to get back to judging applicants on how they conduct themselves in their work time, and not their personal time.
My only point is that people that expect HR departments to be clinical in their evaluations of candidates for a job are sadly out to lunch. It is VERY much a popularity contest, and in most cases (that I've seen), a somewhat more "civilized" impression will beat out a "party naked" one almost every time. And, really, I've not met many HR types that WERE in the "party crazy" crowd, so that is also something to consider. Personally, the last 20 people I've hired, I've looked for a good, "reasonable" social aspect, as well as reasonable skills. I've gone for a nice mix of the two, rather than one extreme or the other, and it's worked out best.
I have been going back through my profile trying to delete any dumb posts I (or my friends) may have left on my Facebook page over the years. So far I am only up to Sept. 2009, but that only took a couple of hours. That is the easy part. The more difficult part is deleting all the stuff I left on other people's pages. Thankfully it now has that "ArmsAkimbo commented on ThisDude's post" blurb or it'd be impossible. I'm just wondering if it'll have that info available for stuff I did back in the olden days since I've had this account since 2004 or so. I believe I've also hidden my friends, and even if you can see them, I've chosen it so the same 6 people (who I know will never post anything besides a safe photograph of themselves) appears. I actually got the idea of sanitizing my profile from someone on the RMMB. I remember them saying they made their profile public so any HR person could snoop around and just wouldn't find anything except pictures of him being a good family guy and everything. This isn't exactly full proof though. As stupid as Myspace became, at least it let you approve of stuff before it was published. I have seen plenty of horror stories where someone was tagged in something over night and wasn't aware people could see it until the next day. Unfortunately I still feel like most of this is not enough. I'm going to start untagging myself from every photo now. I've been toying with the privacy settings for a while and ultimately I will probably just delete the thing. That is a bit too slash and burn for me at this point though.
Focus: I was late to catch onto the myspace thing so I never really devoted much time to it. But, that was all the rage at my school (as well as AIM... holly hell was that thing terrible). I was one of the last classes to join facebook back when you had to have a college e-mail to register, and I was one of the first in my graduating class to do so. I think they hit their apex right around when they did the whole news feed/status update thing, and I haven't really liked it since. I used to put ALL my information on there, tag myself in all the bad pictures, which in hindsight was one of the worst things I could do. I've now taken everything off, except for a few pictures that are actually G-rated, a bunch of notes, and I've created concentric circles of privacy, where those I work with see the the least, my friends see a bit more, and my family sees the most. My view on social networking now is the exact opposite from when I started, and it's based around one fundamental personal change: when I was younger (well, still young, but a few years ago) I wanted to think that I was important and so I sought validation from external, and in this case electronic, sources, because of the e-image I believe I portrayed. Now that there's people that actually do watch me, and are real-life affected by my actions and choices, I want complete anonymity. It's just not worth the risk. Oh, and ditto to whomever talked about the douchebags everywhere with cameras. Before if you did something cool/illegal, you had to try to get everyone to see actual evidence of it. Now, you have to try not to. Alt. Focus: Real-world ramifications. I'll do the requisite and say I've seen (and been involved in) the firing of several people based upon images they posted. It was a liability thing, and as much as we hated to do it, keeping them after that just wasn't worth the risk. The fact that they didn't see the big deal made it all that much more important we let them go. Much of my family is also on facebook, and the drama that goes along with that, is well.... let's just say it's easier for people to say things over the internet, than in person. I'm pretty sure what happened is going to result in the break up of an engagement (fortunately, not mine). And I'm surprised no one has mentioned online dating. A few months after I first tried it (half-asses) I met my now-fiance, but from what I've seen it doesn't look good. I have one acquaintance who'd fuck everything that moved, and for that person it worked great, as long as the standards were low. For the others, well, there was a reason their dates couldn't find ones through normal channels. What do y'all think?
Alt Focus: Real world ramifications: Timely thread, on another forum that I read ( Mustang Club ) one member threatened another through PM. The member he threatened is a police officer and not only did this person threaten to shoot him, he also threatened to shoot his son for no reason other than he had some grudge against police. The thread has quickly jumped to over 280 posts with members digging up his name, address, social, cell phone number, place of employment, family members names, where they live and work etc. etc. People seem to think they have some sort of security behind their keyboards and neglect the fact that almost all of their information is public with a little work. And no, none of that information was obtained by the police officer using his connections it was all done by anonymous members with too much time on their hands.
I've dabbled. Some hits, but more misses. I did, however, eventually meet a woman online who would become my wife. All's well that ends well.
My roommates girlfriend put it so simply once I was stunned I never came to the same conclusion. These companies are making huge investments and risk when hiring someone.Thirty thousand, sixty thousand, and even more a year is a large investment to make in someone. It's really not hard to see why they would have such standards in the first place. Im curious for people that entered the professional work for before the facebook era, how did the HR people vet potential employees for these particular behavioral preconditions? I guess for anyone, how do companies handle long time employees that have heavy drinking patterns? Lets not pretend that everyone "grows up" by their late 20's. They may not be stealing every road sign for ten blocks and pounding natty light but just because they switched to 8 neat Single Malts a night doesn't mean they don't have a problem.
For the most part, they looked at your social/hobbies/activities section on your resume, and basically took your word for it. That was pretty well the only way they had of figuring out what you did in your spare time, and it was only a minor factor in being hired. They had no (easy) way of figuring out that info on their own, so usually didn't weigh heavily in the process. The computer/internet age has opened up way more easily found information to people who make these decisions, so they've added that to their process.
I remember getting into an Interwebs-pissing-match with VillageIdiot before about this, but I know that when I was hiring for a job, part of my reasoning was, "It's so easy to throw on a privacy filter that I question the judgment of anyone who doesn't do so." It takes all of 5 minutes to make this a non-issue. If you were applying for a job, why wouldn't you do it? It strikes me as almost like not spellchecking a resume. It indicates a certain level of carelessness if you leave something embarassing.
I guess there were reasons that, when it began, it was only for college kids. I don't have any of this shit. I have friends, adults, GROWN-UPS, with real jobs, kids and houses that, when they get together yap about Facebooking and have the nerve to shake their heads because I choose to wear my big girl pants, and not participate. I don't think they realize how ridiculous they sound during the course of the conversation. You're 35 years old and you're checking your page from your iphone? Seriously? I just don't get it. If someone wants to communicate with me, text me or better yet pick up the damn phone and call me. If someone wants to hire me the impressions I leave, my skills for qualification for the job and so and so forth come across far better in an interview of some kind not what the hell I post on my "networking with friends, family and fucks site".
As I might have mentioned before, I don't have Facebook and I don't like it having tried it. If I want to talk to you, you'll have my phone number or my MSN. I don't want to connect with random people, old friends or even most of my family. More importantly though: I don't give a fuck about your favourite flavour of ice cream, I don't want to be a part of your 1,000,000 people club who give a shit about yarn or poke you. I'd rather poke my own brain by shoving a giant dildo up my nose. Other than that I enjoy a nice glass of wine, walks on the beach and many other things which you can see on my e-harmony account.
I had a Facebook account that had well over 500 friends. After a short time I realized that I hated 90% of them. I tried to filter out all the retarded people and their bullshit, but every time I checked my account it seemed like I had to wade through a pool full of stupid to do anything. I tried blocking a bunch of people, but it didn't stop the "WHY DONT U ADD ME LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!111" messages. Plus, since I never use my camera and every girl I know brings theirs out drinking, every picture of me was in the bar with a beer in my hand. I have a somewhat unique job so my career wouldn't necessarily be affected by that, but when I'm drunk in every fucking picture ever taken of me, I look like a bit of a worthless dickface. I finally deleted the account permanently, then opened a new account with a random pseudonym. I have everything set to private, no personal info anywhere, no pictures, and only my friends can see my email address. No one can search for me and I only add people that are good friends instead of every retard I run into in the bar. The nice thing about the pseudonym is not having morons see my name on other people's walls/friend lists and try to friend me over and over again. 100% anonymity is the only way to keep the stupid from seeping in.
I'm in agreement with shegirl. I see no need, nor do I feel the desire, to openly share my life with our global village. Posting here is about as far as I go. And don't even get me started on the idiocy of Twitter.
I agree that it's a huge investment, but when your CEO beats his wife, your CFO is an alcoholic and half your work force reports more overtime than is possible for a human to work, is trying to find a new hire that went to college but didn't enjoy it really worth your time? Especially when the best you'll ever do is to find an employee who didn't explicitly announce they enjoyed college, but still probably did? My point is that the employee these companies are looking for is a total unicorn, and the game that used to be played where the employee lied and the employer didn't pry is now over. Your employees are humans, it's time to learn to deal with it (unless you're GM, in which case your employees are assembly line robots and your HR managers are working on figuring out who to fire instead of hire). Except for the fact that Facebook is actively dismantling privacy protections, and even when they weren't, employers would go through effort to access profiles that were restricted in some way.
This. The Internet is public and permanent at all times. 'Set to private' is as good as public to me. I used to do a stupid myspace blog that was set to private. I posted some complaints about work one time, which were supposed to be regarded as funny, inside stuff among my friends and me. I knew if anybody else saw it, they would take it the wrong way. 6 months later, after the blog was long forgotten, I was hired to a different job. I put in my two weeks notice and was fired the next day. The reason? I posted a blog on myspace "betraying" my coworkers. It was just a reason to get rid of me because they were mad at me for taking a better job, which is how petty that company is, but that's beside the point.
Good luck getting a job with this attitude. Here's a tip, when you show up for an interview, wear this and you'll definitely get the job. I suppose companies not hiring people that are convicted felons is bullshit too, cause I mean, we all have committed one... you can't really judge someone by their actions, we all do bad shit and some people were just unlucky enough to get caught. HR departments across the world, Social Networking is here to stay, lower your standards. I don't have Facebook, do the people complain about their parents being on there because their folks are posting pics of themselves getting wasted and shit?