Kids these days.....

I am fascinated by some of the discussions I see taking place either on Facebook or Twitter. Something caught my eye last night during a job hunting chat that made me wonder just where in the world this is all going.

The "what do employers look for on your Facebook page?" topic came up. Many participants jumped right in with what they suspect companies might be finding - and how they react to those findings.

Being someone who sees many of these issues in black and white - and having an employer's perspective I jumped in. "Set your FB page to private. Problem solved." You'd think that would pretty much cover it, right? Well - it didn't.

A guy jumps in with "Transparency is the key". What? Transparency? Drunk pictures? Your obsession with Lady Gaga? Your string of Farmville lameness? This is what you think highlights you as a candidate? No way!

So in this short little back and forth (with a soon to be college graduate ready to jump into the work force) it dawned on me just how misinformed many of these poor kids are. Employers don't need - and should NOT know every thing about your personal life. It is lunacy to think this does anything other than give employers a reason to pass you by.

It ended on this final note from him: "....it is a social culture now, nothing is private."

Is that where we are? Nothing is private? Have these kids no sense of discretion? Who is telling them this? Where do we go from here?

Comment by Maureen Sharib on April 26, 2011 at 10:29am: Down the tubes, Jer.

Down the tubes.

Comment by Jerry Albright on April 26, 2011 at 10:31am: I am just really getting frustrated with the way these chats offer so much advice with little fact/experience behind those "facts". Nothing against the people who organize them of course - it's just that once those ideas are stated they're passed around and RT'd like the gospel. I can barely stand to look at it sometimes - but I'm fascinated at the same time.

Comment by Maureen Sharib on April 26, 2011 at 10:37am: Sounds to me like the wet behind the ears set needs some career coach guidance.

"Common Career Sense From the People's Coach" or somethin' like that

Comment by J. Jeffrey Hallan on April 26, 2011 at 10:53am: The School of Hard Knocks will provide the lessons, Jerry. Theories and abstract concepts are fine, but when put in practice, they'll learn that nothing has really changed in basic human behavior. People will still draw conclusions about you from the information available to them, it's just that there is so much MORE available to them these days. It's unfortunate that some kids are slow to realize this or don't have the guidance from parents or elsewhere to teach them before they do what may be long-term damage to their career prospects.

Comment by Sandra McCartt on April 26, 2011 at 10:57am: What I find amusing ,albeit somewhat pathetic, about the job hunt chats is all the blah blah about transparency while they worry about everything they post and what somebody is going to think about it. The result being that there is no transparency because things are contrived to "build their personal brand".

The end result seems to be that they are making themselves up as they go.

Social culture, really, have we reached the point of personal isolation that interaction with an avatar in 140 characters is social?

The problem I see with this sort of communication is the illusion that any sort of communication is really going on.

As to who is telling them this goofy stuff...their fellow avatars. They all get on there spit out some goofy stuff and they all retweet it until they believe it. It's like a bunch of four year old kids who find something none of them have ever seen. They ask each other what it is until one of them says ,"I know, it's a mugwumps.". Now it has a name they all know what it is and tell anyone who will listen that they saw mugwumps today.

Comment by Barbara Goldman on April 26, 2011 at 11:17am: My first phone number was Valley 5 2355. The ladies wore hats and gloves, and not just on Easter Sunday.

Jerry, I think that you and I grew up in a more gentile society. It used to matter how one presented oneself. We lived by the rule that our undies should be clean. Think of the embarrassment in the emergency room!

The F word was something NOBODY said, let alone watch on television. Jeanie's belly button was mysteriously hidden.

When uncle Joe got drunk at Christmas, nobody took a photo and passed it around. We kept in private. In the family. Transparency? are you kidding? Transparency was for family, and close relationships.

Our permanent record was our transcript, and our police record, and did not contain photos of the drunken college party, or when we inhaled.

It was considered crude behavior to be 'transparent'. Digressions were forgiven, and forgotten.

Stop the world, I want to get off!

Comment by Suresh on April 26, 2011 at 11:26am: Kids, unfortunately are smart enough to use these but can't see the consequences.

Well then again, we have also seen a lot of our grown ups do this and get caught (mayors, college coaches etc) with text messages, twitter posts. I think we are all learning how to deal with this new always ON media

Comment by Karen Kerr on April 26, 2011 at 11:40am: "They need to accept me for who I am!" No. They don't.

Comment by Mat von Kroeker on April 26, 2011 at 11:50am: I've experienced candidates being passed over for ONE misspelling on thier resume--- as if this automatically makes them a blithering idiot by some overly anal retentive HM's and HR departments. In some organizations, if you breath in the wrong direction, you're out--- and more than likely not a good fit for that environment anyway. And more and more I'm finding HR using social media to determine someone's "like-ability", not necessarily thier technical qualifications. Tech-saavy kids know this--- and at the moment, they don't care because it's the one aspect of thier identity that makes them stand out from the "Uncle Joe's".

IMHO--- I'd prefer knowing upfront that I'd not fit in with a bunch of judgemental, puritan, no sense-of-humor having, holier-than-thou cretins than being miserable three months into the position.

Comment by Jerry Albright on April 26, 2011 at 11:56am: If we all posted every single event that took place in our lives - none of us would like any of us.

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