Back in the day, before all this social media malarkey, searching for a new job was a relatively private affair. These were simpler times, whether you registered with an agency or applied to vacancies directly your boss would be none the wiser. Since then it has become considerably more difficult to keep your intentions confidential.

This has been a gradual change and some of you may not have noticed it. Then again, maybe you have but because everyone is constantly raving about the power social media and how it can help you land a job you may not have seen its steady decline to the dark side of the force.

I won’t throw out any statistics here about how many people use social media, how many employers use it to recruit and how many people have landed amazing jobs via social media. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you all know these are impressive and ever rising figures.

At this point I should also point out that I am not about to condemn social media and deny its importance in recruitment (as marketing exec for Hyperion I’d probably be shooting myself in the foot if I were to make such a ridiculous statement!).

What you need to remember is that social media is not private. The only way that it could truly be private is if you simply didn’t have a Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+ or [insert current popular social media platform here].

Let’s start with Linkedin as this is predominantly used for recruitment. Simply having a Linkedin profile shouldn’t get you into any trouble with your boss, although there have been a few exceptional cases where this has caused some problems.

However, if you do work for a particularly suspicious employer here are a few things you could do:

• Select who can see your activity feed as ‘only you’ and turn off your activity broadcasts – this way if you add any of our recruitment consultants to your network or join our group or follow our company this will not show up on your employer’s LI home page
• Select who can see your connections as ‘only you’
• Under groups and associations select ‘change visibility’ of any recruitment groups and deselect the ‘Display the group logo on your profile’ box.
• Under the types of messages you’re willing to receive option deselect any of the appropriate boxes, specifically ‘career opportunities’

Hopefully, if your employer is a paranoid android his should diminish any suspicions.

Now on to the much more invasive social network: Facebook. The new layout has been out long enough for all of you to have gotten used to it by now and not still be annoyed with the changes (after all, the timeline and ticker are pretty awesome, yeah, that’s right, I said it).

Besides the standard liking of a recruitment page such as the Hyperion one there’s another thing you need to be aware of when interacting with recruitment companies or professionals on Facebook: The ticker.

This is the real time feed on the right hand side that shows everything and anything all of your friends do. EVERYTHING AND ANYTHING! Whatever they comment on, like, post, listen to, read, et cetera et cetera.

What you need to worry about is that your Facebook friends can see when you comment on somebody’s status update. For example, if Friend A posts a status update about an available job and you comment on said update with something like “For the love of Christ where do I apply?! This job will finally get me out of the cruddy prison I work in!” all of your friends (including your employers/colleagues if they’re your Facebook friends) will see this even if they’re not connected to Friend A. Unemployment will shortly follow. How to avoid this? Send private messages instead, it’s common sense, really.

Well, that was easy enough. Now on to the next problem: Facebook also publishes actions on the ticker as well as your news feed.
You’ve probably noticed that now you can see whenever a friend listens to something on Spotify, reads an article on the Guardian/Independent/other news site, plays a game, throws a rock at a tree, uses the toilet, or any other imaginable action. Yes, that’s right, any action imaginable, if there’s an app for it, and they’ve accepted the app, it’ll be published.

Can you imagine the possibilities? Today Chris (my boss) started talking to me about cheese because he noticed I’d read an article on the Guardian about a cheese only restaurant. Sure, this is pretty harmless, loving cheese is not a sack-able offense. The problem is that I didn’t read that article via the Facebook site; I visited the Guardian site independently. So what if I were to read slightly more damaging article? How to avoid this? Don’t accept apps on Facebook.

Alternatively, don’t add your boss on Facebook.
 

Oh and don't worry, Hyperion doesn't have an app, so no one will know you read this article. But while you're here you could always check out our vacancies.

Dita