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 Jerry Albright on April 28, 2011 at 3:58pm: I'm not so much saying that "kids won't be kids" - I'm talking about the encouragement among themselves to just let it all hang out publicly. Being a kid at heart I still have my share of fun. You won't see any pictures of it though....:)

Comment by Lauren McCabe on April 30, 2011 at 11:27am: The crux of the problem isn't "kids these days", it's that Facebook is changing its purpose, and rapidly. Of COURSE soon to be grads are confused. When they entered college, FB was a relatively innocuous place where they could share some pictures with their friends, and four years later it's laden with requests to like brands and engage with companies-- even future employers.

Remember FB's roots-- you could only sign up if you had an .edu email address, and one of the first sections of the Facebook profile was place where you listed your current classes-- so you could see which ones your friends were taking, too.

College students are struggling to catch up in Facebook's new landscape.