Job Hunting During The Political Season

[JeffAltmanCoach]

 

SUMMARY:

For those of you who are looking for work, I’m going to tell you point blank, employers are looking at social media profiles for all sorts of information. They’re acting without your permission in doing so.

It starts off with LinkedIn and then they can find you on Facebook or Twitter, and follow you there and just observe you there and start to take note of qualities beyond who you present yourself in a  resume to be.

I remember many years ago, I was doing recruiting for a particular client who was trying to hire an assistant trader who’s basically going to work nights and monitor their prop trading system for any sort of news deviation that might cause, trading to occur outside the normal range of behavior that this system tracked.

After interviewing someone, I received a call from the client saying that they weren’t interested and I should do a Google search for the guy. Lo and behold, I found that this guy had huge trading losses and they were concerned that he would try and use their trading system, or learn their trading model in order to trade his own account.

I understand but the point in all of this is, firms are looking for information in different ways about you and about your opinions. Now, we enter political season. It’s a presidential election coming up and this can be true anytime of the year. Anytime there’s a hot button  issue and, you know,firms are going to look at Facebook. They’re going to look at LinkedIn. They are going to follow you on Twitter or observe you on Twitter and they’re going to see what you’re saying.

Do you want to get rejected for a position because you advocated strongly for a particular position or candidate? Do you want to be rejected for a job or join an organization whereo politics isn’t important to them, where what you do is important. Do you want to be associated with a firm like that? Do they want to hire someone who’s politically oriented?

Yeah, there’s some people who worked in politics or who work in politics and when you’re interviewed, they’re going to talk with you about the skills and experiences you have, and not looking for you to advocate for a particular position or candidate. They’re going to talk with you about your successes and failures. What you learned from the experience . . . you get the drill. But for the civilian who’s the non-political employee, that is they’re not, they don’t have experience working on campaigns and they’re just strong advocates for people, I’m not saying not to say things. I’m just going to simply say, watch how you say things.

I see some things on Facebook sometimes that are insane, not because of the opinion that someone held but the viciousness, with which someone communicates. If you’re an employer seeing that sort of behavior, you gotta pause for a second and say, “Okay, which one is it? Is it the person who presents themselves so nicely, or is this one,” and it gives them reason for hesitation.”

Do you really want to do that? Again, I’m not telling you not to advocate for a position. Watch how you advocate for a position. Hold back some of those obnoxious comments. Don’t always lash out at people as part of your advocacy; keep it on a rational basis. Firms will respect that.

However, if you go bonkers on someone, that can hurt you, and, even if they hire you, they’re always going to be watching you to see if that part of your personality comes out and it can cost you money at the time of the offer. Is it worth it to you? Only you have that answer. I have my opinion. You can have yours.

 

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