Google Guy Those photos dont matter as much as you think

Google Guy Those photos dont matter as much as you think By Jason Warner There has been a lot of press regarding the implications for job seeker of Those Photos on MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites. You know the pictures Im referring to Most of the discussions Ive heard on the topic are cautionary, as in, Beware! What you post or say on the Internet could be online for a Very Long Time! As the leader of large corporate recruiting organizations (now Google, and before that at Starbucks) I have a different perspective. We are in a new and unprecedented time with regard to the level of transparency the Internet creates between jobseekers and employers. More than ever before, jobseekers today know way more about the companies they might work for (and the people inside those companies, if you check OfficeBallot and Vault, for example), and employers know more about the candidates they might want to hire. But here are five reasons that employers are not going to spend their time worrying about your unfortunate online photos and other embarrassing antics from earlier years. 1. There is nothing any of us can do to change the behavior of college students. From what I can tell, these, er, activities have been happening in one form or another for as long as there have been colleges. Which is a very long time indeed. Our parents just didnt mention it. 2. As time goes on, more and more detail about all of us will be found online. Instead of a snippet or an indiscrete photo, there will be entire personal and professional dossiers about all of us and that information will be far more influential than a few unfortunate and unfocused pictures. For example, a blog is an excellent example of the sort of information that might be relevant to employers, if only to get a sense of how a potential hire communicates in writing. Half-naked underwear shots through a tequila-stained lensnot so valuable. 3. Searching for Those Photos wont be worth our time. As the velocity of job changes continues to move along at a rapid pace, and talent moves into and out of organizations more frequently than ever before. Most studies indicate that corporate recruiting departments are continuing to be strained to do more with less. So recruiters wont have time to go hunting for Those Photos when theres not much return on that investment. 4. The information isnt relevant anyway. Those Photos are representative of behaviors that many young candidates experience, and dont likely correlate to on the job performance. If we have the bravery to get real about the topic, we all recognize that there a lot of things we do in private that we wouldnt shared in public. Given the reach and permanence, the Internet just provides a smaller margin of error for revealing these natural human slips. 5. Its a slippery slope that could be bad for employers. Today there is a fuzzy but growing distinction that companies will continue to draw between candidate professional experiences, competencies, and capabilities and their private lives and outside behaviors. Its a line we dont likely want to cross, because if we cross it for candidates, we may cross it for employees, and that compounds the problem to a monumentally greater degree. In most cases, Those Photos will become a non-issue as this phase of the Internet Age plays itself out. Indeed, the leading companies in talent acquisition will continue to refine their hiring processes to become more and more scientific over time, because we now have much more data and tools to quantify what drives performance inside our companies. However, the vast majority of selection processes at companies arent based on data-driven analysis as much as on interview processes that are far from scientific. So, there certainly is risk in posting Those Photos online. But that risk should diminish over time.