“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
[0] https://www.lawdepot.com/blog/should-employers-look-at-socia...
> 57 percent are less likely to interview a candidate they can't find online
> 54 percent have decided not to hire a candidate based on their social media profiles
> Half of employers check current employees' social media profiles, over a third have reprimanded or fired an employee for inappropriate content
> 70 percent of employers use social media to screen candidates, up from 11 percent in 2006
For more than half of the world's population or 80+% of all internet users "an online presence" means precisely "social media". Nothing else comes even close to that. It's also one of the few segments where people use their real identity. Your anonymous HN account will fly under the radar.
Let's not bury our heads in the sand, employers will check social media so they don't hire anyone who's publicly offensive or extremist, unprofessional, trashes their employer, even someone posting too much or with poor communication skills, etc. From a link in the article I posted above [0].
[0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/number-of-employers...
Actually for my current job they added me right after I won the recruitment, around the time I was starting the job, "validated" my timeline on different platforms, and then quietly removed themselves from my lists. So they did some due diligence but wanted to show this had no bearing on the recruitment process.