Watch what you say on line. Your next job could depend on it.

An article by Tim Difford in thenextweb.com reports on a survey by Microsoft which not only confirms that HR recruitment professionals look online to gather information about prospective candidates, but also quantifies the extent to which this practice now prevails. Specific findings indicate that:

• 43% of European recruitment professionals routinely analyse prospective candidates’ online reputations before deciding whether to select them for interview.

• Content drawn from search engines, personal blogs, and social networking sites are all liable to be scrutinised in the process.

• Across Europe 23% of recruiters have gone as far as rejecting candidates based on their online reputation. This hides considerable country to country differences, ranging from 41% in the UK, to 16% in Germany and 14% in France.

• Germany, however, incorporates online data into its candidate assessments in 59% of cases, with lower figures recorded elsewhere across the continent.

• In the USA 70% of HR professionals admit to rejecting clients based solely on their web-presence.

• The most common reasons for candidates being rejected relate to “inappropriate comments or text written” by the applicant or “unsuitable photos or videos”.

• In Britain only 9% of people consider their online reputation to be a significant factor when applying for jobs, which, in all the circumstances is a surprisingly low figure.

There is only one conclusion one can draw from all of this: Watch what you say online – your next job could depend on it!

Some thoughts on Twitter

The Economist have a special report on social networking this week. They have, as you might expect, an article on Twitter and how it has grown and grown of late, with, for example, 58 million web visitors in October of last year alone. Unfortunately we do not know what % of these were business related. However I expect that the vast majority were personal rather than business related, and while they tell us about Thitter as a whole they leave us no wiser when it comes to the business usage of Twitter.

But they have some other interesting figures as well. For example, they say that

• one in five who sign up never tweet (20%)
• half of those who do, tweet only once in 74 days (50%)
• the 10% most active members contribute 90% of tweets

My take on all of that is that

A minority on Twitter can only be described as maniacs………………………………….……..(10%)

A very substantial majority are in effect non-users………………………………………………….(70%)

That leaves the remainder who might be described as normal users of the system………(20%)

And my overall conclusions are that Twitter is for a minority of people and that while most so-called experts just recommend that you should just get in there and start tweeting, it might be better to stop and think: what am I going to do here and how am I going to do it?

In other words remember that this is a tool and if you want to use it for business purposes it might just be better to have some sort of coherent strategy in place first! That may not be so important for personal users, but for business users it is essential.