Reckless Internet Habits That Make You Almost Unemployable [Checklist]

Earlier this month, Jobvite released the results of their 2013 Social Recruiting Survey. When I read the report, it was really just a confirmation of what everyone already knows – social recruiting is more powerful than ever before. If you have recently been in talks with a company about a job, don’t for one second think they aren’t scoping you out in social media as part of the decision-making process. The last thing you want to do is make yourself accidentally unemployable.

The fact is, if they don’t check out your social media presence, they would be in the minority. Almost all companies do that now. It’s a given. There is a twist around this though that I didn’t think about until today. According to Jobvite President and CEO Dan Finnigan:

“Social recruiting provides a way to quickly and easily find those ‘under the radar’ candidates – people who might not be actively looking for a role, but who are a perfect fit for open positions at your company. This data speaks to the power of social recruiting, and it is exciting to think about what’s on the horizon.”

If you click over to Jobvite, you can download all the results from this survey. There is also an infographic on that page worth checking out. This chart below is a snippet from that infographic, and it points to things you might be doing that are making you inadvertently unemployable. We all know that posting drunken pictures on Facebook will not help our chances of snagging our dream jobs, but according to Jobvite, it goes much deeper than that.

As I’ve always said, it’s a little disheartening to know that if I’m on my iPhone (maybe in a store or office), and I quickly type a tweet with a typo that it could affect my ability to get a job – but apparently that’s the case. Of course, one typo is no big deal, but if your Twitter stream is littered with poor spelling and grammar, it could absolutely render you unemployable. The other things on this list are pretty obvious. It’s interesting how ‘overly political posts’ have no positive or negative effect.