Online persona can ruin your shot at that job

When a small consulting company in Chicago was looking to hire a summer intern this month, the company's president went online to check on a promising candidate who had just graduated from the University of Illinois.

At Facebook, a popular social-networking site, the executive found the candidate's Web page with this description of his interests: "smokin' blunts" (cigars hollowed out and stuffed with marijuana), shooting people and obsessive sex, all described in vivid slang.

It did not matter that the student was clearly posturing. He was done.

"A lot of it makes me think, what kind of judgment does this person have?" said the company president, Brad Karsh.

Many companies that recruit on college campuses have been using search engines such as Google and Yahoo! to conduct background checks on seniors looking for jobs.

And now, college career counselors and other experts said, some recruiters are looking up applicants on social-networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and Friendster, where students often post risqué photographs and provocative comments about drinking, drug use and sexual exploits.

Such postings can make students look immature and unprofessional, at best, to corporate recruiters and admissions officials at graduate and professional schools.

"It's a growing phenomenon," said Michael Sciola, director of the career-resource center at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. "There are lots of employers that Google. Now they've taken the next step."

At New York University, recruiters from about 30 companies told career counselors they were looking at the sites, said Trudy Steinfeld, executive director of the center for career development.

"The term they've used over and over is 'red flags,' " Steinfeld said. "Is there something about their lifestyle that we might find questionable or that we might find goes against the core values of our corporation?"

On MySpace and similar sites, personal pages are generally available to anyone who registers. Facebook has separate requirements for different categories of users.

College students must have a college e-mail address to register and personal pages are restricted to friends and others on the user's campus, leading many students to assume they are relatively private.

But companies can gain access in several ways. Employees who are recent graduates often retain college e-mail addresses, enabling them to see pages. Sometimes, too, companies ask college students working as interns to perform online background checks, said Patricia Rose, director of career services at the University of Pennsylvania.

Concerns have been raised about these and other Internet sites, from their potential misuse by stalkers to students exposing their own misbehavior, for example by posting photographs of hazing by sports teams. Add to the list of unintended consequences the new hurdles for the job search.

Ana Homayoun, who runs Green Ivy Educational Consulting in the San Francisco area, visited Duke University this spring for an alumni weekend and while there planned to interview a promising job applicant.

Curious about the candidate, she went to her page on Facebook, where she found explicit photographs and commentary about the student's sexual escapades, drinking and pot smoking. Among the pictures were shots of the young woman passed out after drinking.

"I was just shocked by the amount of stuff that she was willing to publicly display," Homayoun said. "When I saw that, I thought, 'OK, so much for that.' "

Rose said a recruiter told her he rejected an applicant after searching for the name of the student, a chemical-engineering major, on Google. Among things the recruiter found, she said, was this remark: "I like to blow things up."

Occasionally students find evidence online that might explain why a job search is foundering. Tien Nguyen, a senior at the University of California, Los Angeles, signed up for interviews with corporate recruiters, but he was seldom invited.

Then a friend suggested Nguyen research himself on Google. He found a link to a satirical essay, entitled "Lying Your Way to the Top," that he had published last summer on a Web site for college students. He asked that the essay be removed. Soon, he began to be invited to job interviews and has received several offers.

"I never really considered that employers would do something like that," he said. "I thought they would just look at your résumé and grades."

Rose said of the online sites, "Students go on them a lot and, unfortunately, now employers go there."

But some companies, including Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Ernst & Young and Osram Sylvania, said they did not use the Internet to check on job applicants. "I'd rather not see that part of them," said Maureen Crawford Hentz, manager of talent acquisition at Osram Sylvania. "I don't think it's related to their bona fide occupational qualifications."

A handful of major corporations, including Morgan Stanley, Dell, Pfizer, L'Oréal and Goldman Sachs, turned down or did not respond to requests for interviews for this story. But others, particularly those involved in the digital world, said researching students through social-networking sites is fairly typical.

"For the first time ever, you suddenly have very public information about almost any candidate who is coming through the process," said Warren Ashton, group marketing manager at Microsoft.

He said Microsoft recruiters are given broad latitude, and there is no formal policy about using the Internet to research applicants.

Microsoft and Osram Sylvania also have started to use social-networking sites in a different way, participating openly in online communities to get out their company's message and identify talented job candidates.

Students may not know when they have been passed up for a job offer because of something a recruiter saw on the Internet.

But more than a dozen college career counselors said recruiters had been telling them since last fall about incidents in which students' online writing or photographs raised serious questions about their judgment.

Many counselors have been urging students to review their pages on Facebook and other sites, removing photographs or text that might be inappropriate to show to their grandmother or potential employers. Counselors also encourage students to apply settings on Facebook that can significantly limit access to their pages.

But it is not clear whether many students are following the advice. "I think students have the view that Facebook is their space and that the adult world doesn't know about it," said Mark Smith, director of the career center at Washington University in St. Louis. "But the adult world is starting to come in."