Social media is on your resume whether you want it to be or not

Oh, Google and Facebook. Thanks to the two giants of search and social, you can’t really hide very easily anymore. If you have things in your past that you don’t want known, businesses considering hiring you don’t have to hire an investigator to go beyond the standard background check. They simply need to find you online.

Your LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest – they’re all available. Sure, you can go private or choose not to participate in social media in the first place, but there are challenges with that as well. Since everyone is on social media (at least from certain peoples’ perspectives), if you’re not on it, what are you trying to hide? A non-presence can be just as damaging in your pursuits of certain jobs as having some risque photos or extreme views visible publicly through social media.

The best approach – go bold. Craft your social media presence to reflect who you are and what you want others to see about you. That doesn’t mean that you have to be super-active or let out a ton of personal details, but having a nice, normal social media presence that doesn’t raise red flags is the easiest way to make sure that social media doesn’t hurt your chances at getting a job. For further information, here’s an infographic that discusses how social media is now part of the resume.

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“Job Interview” image courtesy of Shutterstock. Infographic by DigiSquash.