While more and more recruiters look for information about candidates on the internet, or recruit directly on social networks, every footstep we leave on these sites may turn out dangerous, or even disastrous. Numerous blogs or ebooks are now focusing on the ways to manage our e-reputation, and Frédéric Cavazza suggested me the other day we could adopt the attitude of artists, who often preserve their private life.
But how could we ask a teenager, in the age where sharing and provoking are ways of life, to resist uploading photos from a trash evening on their Facebook page? Should we, broadly speaking, go against a trend where professional and private parts of our life are merging, where interacting is often (maybe too often) a mere synonym to transparency?
E-reputation: management or dictatorship?
We are all teenagers in the fast growing universe of social media. Those who were yesterday able to preserve their private life while being overexposed, are now trapped too. During the last months, some first-class sportsmen’s career was endangered by tweeting or posting publicly some private stuff, andmy take is that Mark Cuban or Michael Phelps examples are just a beginning… If e-reputation management is now an important part of our professional life, it cannot, and shouldn’t, censor our private life. What is to be done as the frontier between both is now dissolving?
Job boards 2.0 vs Recruitment 2.0
Recruitment practices are changing on these days. Recruiters are present on main social networks, use video, favor recommended candidates… Job boards 2.0 Era has begun, but may we talk about Recruitment 2.0? Definitely not. Since recruitment in the age of the social web needs more than using new tools to change, it needs a mindset shift. Answering a job offer is enough to understand this shift didn’t happen yet.
Recruiters have still to find and setup different relationships with candidates. They will have to earn trust as real consultants, learn, and teach, what is meaningful in our digital footsteps, filter professional competencies from casual playful activities noise.
Of course, every tool is still not available for that. Imagine for instance a search engine with a chronological filter, giving results from the last x years, letting us able to focus on the significant period of our professional life. But beyond tools, what we need is a real cultural change. Recruitment 2.0 doesn’t exist. Yet.
Wise words.
It’s true I’ve read quite a few interesting articles on this. Including the recent article on The Brand Builder than I found through your Twitter feed on “Is Your Social Media Director Qualified?”
http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/is-your-social-media-director-qualified/
Reading your article here, made me think of the decisions I had to make when I first started blogging. I was forged in the corporate world – this gave me my professionalism today.
Last year, I often got successful 50 year old white males approaching me out of the blue, “advising” me to make my personal blog “more professional”. Now there were several things going on in my mind.
The top one being that I did not want a stereotyped American style blog like most of the blogs I saw last year. I wanted my blog to show that I was not American. And, if possible, gently stimulate curiosity for something outside of my readers normal environment. So in a way, I had traits of the teenagers you described.
It was only after I understood what social media was, that I was happy I went through my rebellion. I did not listen to the “advice” offered to me last year. My blog is about me, with my hair let down. There is authenticity, you can see what I’m good at and what I’m not. And you need authenticity to be successful online.
The reason why I’m writing now, is I wonder just how “formal” or “professional” you are expected to be when recruiters come online.
Just like the comments in The Brand Builder article mentioned above, I think there is a real need to educate the people hiring online. They probably need to adjust the qualities they are looking for if they want online success… and by then I hope that most of the young ones today will not be handicapped by the traces of their youth they leave online.
On a side note, it has always fascinated me to notice the cultural differences in what is acceptable or not in certain professions in different countries – the differences can be huge! Living in France I wonder if this will play a role in online success compared to different countries.
Cindy,
thanks for your perception. Words themselves tend to have different meanings, depending on the era or the culture they are applied to. “Professional” had a nice degree of creativity in it during the seventies, and has now a lot of formal requirements. Things will change again, of course, but much faster in the wild outside online world than in the corporate universe. Recruitment usually reflects more what companies think they need than how they could use people at their best, and the gap still widens…