By KAREN JAEN
She sat in front of her computer, observing her current Facebook friends and judging who may hinder her college application. After selecting 1,178 friends, she clicked delete.
“I deleted them because they didn’t reflect the type of image I wanted to portray to a college or a future employer,” senior Caroline Harding said.
Harding applied to seven different colleges that may or may not conduct a search of her social networking profile. Recently colleges and universities have been using social networking to their benefit. According to a Kaplan survey of 320 admissions counselors from the top 500 schools, 1 in 10 admissions counselors views an applicant’s social networking profile during their decision-making process. About 38 percent of the students searched harmed their chances of gaining admission by posting inappropriate material online.
“Competitive schools have a prestigious reputation to keep and they wouldn’t want one person to be a detriment to them [because of inappropriate online material]” Harding said.
Posting pictures depicting use of illegal substances or conducting an illegal act is an example of what admissions counselors are looking for to help make their decisions. Even friends on Facebook and MySpace can harm one’s college admission, which was Harding’s purpose in deleting more than half of her Facebook friends.
“I deleted people who had pictures of them doing stupid things; I didn’t want to be associated with them. Things that would come back to bite me, I deleted,” Harding said.
Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are the growing trend of the current generation. According to The Nielsen Company’s study, Facebook users spend about 7 hours a month online, an increase from the June 2009 stat istic that stated user spent an average of four hours online a month.
With a growing number of 500 million users, Facebook is the current, preferred site among all ages for social networking. According to Facebook.com/statistics, people are spending 700 billion minutes a month on Facebook alone.
These sites allow one to post weekend adventures and chat with long distance friends, but they can also make a mark in one’s professional life when used inappropriately.
“Everything you do is documented. People have access to things that can come back to haunt you. There are so many consequences [to social networking], every mistake you make is documented,” Harding said.
Employers are using social networking as a way of narrowing down candidates applying for jobs. Some employers now search an applicant’s social networking profile as part of the application process. Employers may look at one’s profile picture, last status update, tweets and possibly one’s friends.
These searches are not only subjected to possible employees; employers are also conducting regular visits to their current employee’s Facebook profiles. Other employees only conduct social networking searches if they have reason to believe the employee is posting inappropriate material.
Posting status updates about how much one hates his job, or bad-mouthing his boss, is exactly what employers consider inappropriate. According to a study by ExecuNet, 77 percent of employers are conducting these kinds of searches and 35 percent said they have removed someone from employment or have not hired someone because of the content found.
“[We have not hired someone because of questionable online material]. There was an open position for executive assistant. She made it through the first interview and were recommended for a final interview. [The boss] did a Google search on the applicant’s name and all of her sites came up, Facebook, Myspace… He saw an inappropriate profile picture. He decided that [she] wasn’t the type of person he wanted to reflect upon him and his position,” Lorisse Garcia, Recruiting and Leadership Development Manager of the Orlando Magic, said.
The dangerous part of social networking is that once something is posted, it is never truly deleted. Any photos, status updates, comments, etc. remain on the content delivery network server’s (CDN) cache.
The CDN’s cache can be deleted if either the server does it directly or the server crashes, otherwise the information may be kept on the server indefinitely.
Some profiles may be set to private which denies the sharing of information with anyone who is not a friend or follower. However, millions of users do not use this setting thus allowing the world to view their lives through a computer screen.
“The scary thing about social networking is that it’s never private. Your life is out for everyone to see,” Garcia said.