Branding Yourself on the Web: Control the Message Before It Controls You
Slightly embarrassed about an old Facebook entry showing you smashed out of your mind wearing an elaborate beer bong and a T shirt that says WORK SUX BUT I NEED THE BUX? You should be, and not just because it shows someone filling the bong with some lite beer that tastes more like a urine sample than actual malted hops. You should be embarrassed because your next employer will find it too. Or should I say the hiring manager at the next job you apply for.
Unfair? Of course not. Gimme a break! Suppose you had started a business with your own money. Given two equally desirable and qualified job applicants, is Mr. or Ms. Beer Brong the kind of person you’d put first on your list? Or would it be the who looked stone cold sober on that Facebook page? What if that page linked to a blog showing off that person’s expertise in web promotion, mentoring skills, or church involvement?
Maybe you’re not the business-minded type. Try this on for size. You learn you’re about to have new baby. You work your butt off at Olive Garden or Wal-Mart or a local insurance brokerage to get a managerial promotion with medical benefits. You hire someone with less than stellar work skills. Your boss turns up that same beer bong page in the three-minute-after-the-fact forensic investigation to determine why you hired the kind of flake who showed up on Wednesday for a job that started Monday. How do you plan to defend your hiring decision?
Let’s take the heat off you for a second. Suppose an apparel brand you like is demonstrably underpaying its employees and exploiting children in a third-world country. They respond to stories about factory conditions with weasel wording about local cultures taking a different view on child labor, about how they really aren’t associated with the company that runs the factory, and about how it was all set up by a consultant and not themselves. What message are they sending to you? Suppose another apparel brand you like has a factory here in your own country and has a great reputation for paying its workers fairly. You’ve seen a news story about how their workers stay on for 40% longer than the industry average and that job openings always result in lines that stretch around the block. You like both brands fine. Which are you likely to choose next time you need a T shirt?
Take it from a hiring manager. We know how to use that internet thingie almost as well as you do. Late-breaking update: it’s not even very hard. More and more, employers are acting on something you should know already. You are a brand. What you’ve published about yourself is often the only message most people will get from you. The web is the best way for a prospective employer (or children, or spouse, or ex-spouse’s attorney) to find out about Brand You.
And if you don’t control your message, it will control you.
You make it sound that hiring is a methodical process, that all companies follow a very rigid process and employees who don’t follow it have only themselves to blame if they don’t get the job.
Well, from one hiring manager to another, let me tell you that hiring in many places is an absolute mess. This includes those Internet powerhouses that proclaim to “hire only the best and brightest.” The reality is that the candidate controls very little of the hiring process.
If you were to study how hiring is done at many companies, large and small, it is extremely chaotic. The people who already have a job inside the company many times do NOT care about the applicants. Unless the hiring manager himself is someone who has lost out on a job he knew he was willing and capable of doing, it’s no big deal if he lets candidate after candidate slip by. He can simply say to his boss, “They don’t make them like they used to” and never be challenged on it. (How can you see 80 people and say none of them are qualified?)
Now, to the heart of this reply. Like many things in life my 2-word answer to your scenario is, IT DEPENDS! You present this case of 2 candidates who show up, one with a stellar background and another with some Facebook page that says some otherwise objectionable thing about beer and bongs. Who would I choose? It depends.
I’ve been in hiring situations where I extended an offer precisely to the one that most other employers would write off. Why? Because I saw several other valuable attributes. Hiring superstars comes with its own set of nightmares as explained by the founder of Friendster. Additionally, I’ve had situations where I specifically chose someone who wanted more than anything to change his life, prove himself and overall had a better attitude than arrogant 4.0GPA jackasses.
Moreover, that person got along far better with the staff. Why? Because he had real-life experience in prospering after setbacks. If you like most American employers want to play it safe, you can keep your allegedly clean candidates, who are really making a game of masquerading as it is.
As John Fuhrman put it, “Reject me! I love it!”
@Jurgen, I can’t add anything to your post. Bravo! I do need to discuss the necessity of failure later.
When I was young, my father told me that I must have two faces; a public and a private face. The public face is to carefully controlled and manipulated to my advantage, whereas the other is never to be revealed except to those I’d have absolute trust in (basically nobody). In the fifty odd years I’ve walked the earth, I’ve found this advice to be invaluable and has saved me much grief (and expense). I offered this same wisdom to my daughter who soundly rejected it, and is now living her life as an open book (she’s twenty now and has no problem documenting every private detail of her life via Facebook). It will be interesting (and probably provide me with much future entertainment) to see how this works out for her.
@JoJo: I went your daughter’s route. My upbringing led me to rebel just like your daughter. I hated the hypocrisy of being treated one way at home and another in public. I endeavored to fuse the public and private faces and have, modulo a few obvious things like keeping personal data to myself so identity thieves can’t get to it.
Ironically I married someone who likes the JoJo’s Dad approach, sigh…
Cheers,
Tom Campbell