Ask HN: Does lack of a social media presence harm employment chances?
With a very large number of companies now vetting the social media accounts of their applicants I was wondering how its seen if someone has no social media presence at all?
Grain of salt, though, I'm in a field where a portfolio is required upfront, so that replaces a huge amount of signaling that might have to come from other places.
Is that even legal? How? Why?
===========================================
Article 8 – Right to respect for private and family life
1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
So basically it's illegal until the authorities deem it to be legal.
Local police forces are literally legalized mafias, and they lack pretty much all preventive oversight.
Their thirst for tax money and control of the local populace is so evident that one need only google around for cases of murder, cover ups, militarization, steroids.... you name it, local police departments have controversy in spades.
That they are now requiring your password to a digitized and synced database of all your contacts, conversations, and photos..... it shows how thirsty they are for allegiance and control, not public safety.
Just like the recent reports of people being required to hand over their phone passcodes to US border control.
Eighty percent of recruiters/hiring managers google you before inviting you in for an interview. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-p-joyce/job-search-tips_...)
Read the story about Pete Kistler: https://brandyourself.com/info/about
There are enough people who use social media but hide their friends list, posts, tweets, etc. from all non-friends, so if you're concerned you can set up a profile which you don't use and keep your (non-)activity hidden.
No it doesn't. What got me jobs:
- Good, to the point cover letter (what job are you applying for? why are you interested in it? invitation to view your resume and invitation to get on the phone to explore more).
- Good resume - tailored for the job (not super customized, just suitable for the title / responsibilities).
- Got a place online they can check out previous work? Huge bonus points. There's still plenty of competition for people who've actually built stuff. And, talking about an interesting project is far more fun than talking about past experiences, especially if it is a recent / current project.
- Social Media: I'd say not having a profile is better than having one.
I walk into interviews and the interviewer often starts off by asking something basic such as "Do you know what object oriented programming is?"
My best known essay is "Object Oriented Programming Is An Expensive Disaster Which Must End." The essay was discussed here on Hacker News:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8420060
Anyone who Google's my name will discover this and many other essays. Yet I've never met an interviewer who knew that I wrote these essays.
When I started the blog I kept it strictly professional and strictly about technology. But as the years went by, I realized that no employer would ever look at it, so I started posting political things. At first I worried that employers would see this and avoid me because of the politics. But no. I routinely walk into job interviews and the people who talk to me have never looked online for any information about me.
Seriously, in the last 10 years I've had 6 jobs and 30 freelance clients. None of them every looked me up before I arrived for the interview.
But in other fields it might be different story. My wife is a recruiter for a large hospital. She has told me that while this is not official but usually if an applicant doesn't have social media profile, they usually move to bottom of the list. Most of the recruiters are young there, and they find it weird/suspicious that someone is not easily searchable.
My wife's recommendation is to at least, have a profile with picture and hide everything else.
However, for senior positions, they don't usually care so much for profiles as most of applicants applying for those positions don't really have any social media profiles.
Edit: unless you mean Linkedin or something like github as a social account?
Those count, unfortunately. But I'm skeptical that a "github resume" matters much.
LinkedIn seems to matter a lot more strictly for getting offers from recruiters, though.
One of the great reasons not to have a LinkedIn account. Those aren't offers any way. They're just shotgunned spam to users with > 10% keyword matches.
It doesn't. I don't know why people on HN think it does, but in real life, most people I've worked with ave empty GitHub accounts.
From my experience, the quality of people reaching out to you particularly not from linkedin is very high. I personally had made a decision of rejecting employers who insist on having a linkedin profile. But surprisingly, so far no one has ever asked me about that and all my employers (present and past) were ready to hire me even though I do not have a visible social presence (read linkedin).
But, in extreme circumstances when you badly need a job, this thought of having a vibrant social presence haunts you (I have gone through it). But since it is a conscious choice, it is a decision I'm very happy about.
Mind you, having a bad profile will get you rejected, so no profile might be better in some people's cases.
I said this in a separate comment, but I want to read this here, in response to what you said. In the last 10 years, I've never had an employer search for me online. Never.
What's he actually trying to achieve? Presumably in most cases when he searches all he'll see is a name and a thumbnail photo, given that most people these days have at least a little concern about online privacy. Unless he's actually 'friending' all his candidates before he hires them, which would be super weird.
Also, doesn't Facebook have a setting where your profile doesn't show up in searches? So he could potentially be rejecting people that actually meet his own (weird) requirement.
Or maybe I'm reading too much into what was probably just pub talk!
I'm going to start to make a point of discussing tech-related subjects with non-technical friends more often, because their opinions often surprise me. Case in point: Theresa May's quest to ban maths.
And you would be shocked to hear all the misconceptions and myths that the general populace have been fed by the media or picked up from someone at work with Dunning-Kruger effect. It's pointless to try convince them otherwise unless they are your close friends or family.
None of my jobs have ever asked for it and if they went looking and found nothing, I still got the jobs.
Honestly if an employer ever asked me for it, it would be a clear-cut sign that I don't need to work there.
It baffles me that orgs do this despite the insane signal it sends to candidates. You're basically filtering for people who are either 1) so desperate for work that they'll allow their employer to violate their privacy indefinitely 2) playing weird games where they have second versions of themselves set up with fake content (I knew people who did this in college.)
I personally heard about a few small companies that wanted the employee applicants to submit their resume through fæcebook. And the biggest facepalm was that those were not "social media marketing firms" (whatever that is), but regular businesses.
If a social media presence (or disclosure of a social media identity) is a condition of employment at some particular (or peculiar) firm, then I think the only recourse is that I should prefer to be a scrivener and that I should prefer not to.