That Tweet Just Doomed Your Wall Street Career: William D. Cohan
July 25, 2011 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
As if it weren’t difficult enough to
find a job in this still-struggling economy, prospective
employees have a new hurdle to overcome: the dreaded — and
highly sophisticated — social-media background check.
Thanks to an increasingly popular service provided by
Social Intelligence Corp., a year-old company in Santa Barbara,
California, an applicant’s every faux pas, every bit of perverse
logic, every bit of a tongue-in-cheek comment that falls flat –
to say nothing of overt or implied prejudice and lewd personal
photographs — can now be easily scraped off Internet networking
sites including Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and LinkedIn, and
compiled in an attractive dossier that can easily be used to
zotz you from any potential job.
We have heard warnings for years, of course, about how
seemingly innocuous, or highly personal, utterances shared with
friends on social networking websites can live on forever and
potentially doom a budding professional career. And we were all
recently treated to the jarring spectacle of Congressman Anthony
Weiner’s well-deserved self-immolation — in 140 characters or
less.
No Buried Secrets
But these days, thanks to Social Intelligence, whatever
challenges employers once faced by having to search site after
site to find information about prospective employees has been
solved by — and outsourced to — the company’s algorithms, an
inevitable consequence of the power of search engines in the
Internet Age.
“We are not detectives,” Max Drucker, the chief executive
officer of Social Intelligence, told the New York Times in a
much discussed article. “All we assemble is what is publicly
available on the Internet today.” A sobering observation for
sure.
If the message were not already crystalline, there is no
longer any doubt that extreme vigilance with regard to social
networking is no longer an option — it is a necessity. Who
knows how many budding presidents of the U.S. or CEO’s of
Goldman Sachs have already been nipped in the bud by Drucker’s
handiwork? He told the Times that he found one prospective
employee searching for OxyContin on Craigslist, and other
background checks found damning evidence of racist and anti-
Semitic remarks.
Good Old Days
Once upon a time, before the Internet, such sleuthing would
have been nearly impossible, meaning that many people happily
and productively employed in the highest ranks of corporate
America no doubt have committed inchoate acts of foolishness
that today would be punished early and often.
Can this be considered progress or evidence that Big
Brother is very much a part of daily life? To help people begin
to grapple with the implications of this kind of digital
monitoring, a review of a few of the more insightful online
comments about the Times story is instructive.
Basic Internet Hygiene
A “John Doe,” in New York City, wrote that he thought
schools should teach “basic internet hygiene,” including to
“assume that everything you post under your true name will
forever be in the public domain, because, well, it will be” and
to “never post a photo of yourself online unless it is bland and
you can absolutely control access to it.”
“Doe” has little use for social networking. “In general,
the less of yourself that appears online, the better off you
will be,” he wrote. “Facebook? No thanks.” He also wrote that he
expected legislators to do little to protect us from the more
heinous aspects — mistaken identity, for instance — of Social
Intelligence’s dossiers. “If they get it wrong,” he wrote of
Social Intelligence, it could destroy “a person’s life with no
possibility of appeal. Naturally, our leaders in Congress can be
expected to do nothing about this. After all, we are not wealthy
bankers.”
Very Slippery Slope
Others commenters simply see this new service as the
beginning of a very slippery slope. “This is us, giving up a
little essential liberty — one photo, one text, one post, one
status update, one Tweet at a time,” “K. Johnson” wrote. Added
“DCS”: “I’ve never said or done anything online that anyone
could possibly take offense to. I just hope I don’t have to
interview with the one person who takes offense at people who
have never said or done anything offensive online.”
“John,” in Northern California, worries that the new
dossiers will be used, and candidates rejected, but no
fingerprints will ever be left behind. “They won’t tell you
that’s why they aren’t hiring you,” he wrote. “You’ll just be
skipped over, the same way people or groups routinely are now if
they don’t fit a certain ethnic, racial or physical (fat, thin)
profile. They won’t admit this, however, and you can’t prove
it.”
A Private Diary
Then there is the slightly perverse but well-taken logic
that “Gramercy” displayed in a comment. “I actually applaud
this,” it read. “It may be because I consider myself as an adult
who uses social media just to keep in touch or because I am
getting older, but I am actually glad to see that indiscretions
and bad judgment exhibited online can and will be held against
those pinheads who use the Internet as their private diary. And
while I am at it, we should set standards: anyone who has seen a
full episode of Jersey Shore or the Housewives of whatever, or
can identify the names of the Kardashians should not be allowed
to hold a real job or to drive for that matter.”
Given the existence of companies like Social Intelligence,
it just makes common sense not to put anything in an e-mail or
social networking post that you wouldn’t be proud to see on the
front page of the New York Times.
(William D. Cohan, a former investment banker and the
author of “Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the
World,” is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed
are his own.)
Read more Bloomberg View columns.
To contact the writer of this column:
William D. Cohan at wdcohan@yahoo.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this column:
Tobin Harshaw at
tharshaw@bloomberg.net.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.
