Keeping your personal life separate from your green job application process…

Penned by Carolyn

As this is posted, I’m off for a week in Colorado, enjoying the end of ski season up in the mountains. I know you’re on the edge of your seats waiting for the continuation of Bright Green Resume Boot Camp, but another temporally-relevant subject is on my mind this week as students are off sipping (chugging?) tequila drinks on spring break.

So, this week’s subject? Keeping your personal life separate from your job application process; or “how to keep the 457 photos your friends posted on Facebook of you blacked out in a club in Cabo from surfacing as you’re applying for a job in the real world.”

I’m one of those people who’s generally disgruntled about how connected we all are and how much information is out there (yes, ironic given that I work on a lot of Bright Green Talent’s social media). However, if you just can’t step away from your iPhone, Facebook, MySpace, etc, here’s a common sense checklist for cleaning up your image.

Facebook:

• First off, fix your Facebook privacy settings to keep people from being able to find you.
• And control who can see your photos.
• And consider – as hilarious as they are, how many photos of you with a drink in your hand do you really need? Detag where necessary.
• Are any of your groups incriminating?
• All that stuff we said about professional networking? Keep it separate from Facebook. Avoid “friending” professional contacts – people you might ask for a reference from, your aunt’s friend who has connections with a green marketing company you’re interested in, etc. Use LinkedIn for that.

On the interwebs:

• Google yourself: look for news, web hits, and images.
• Check on YouTube for embarrassing videos that your friends uploaded.
• Check Flickr and other public image hosting sites as well.
• If there’s anything incriminating up there, try to get it removed, or at least have an explanation prepared.

Twitter:

While I’m still trying to wrap my head around Twitter and why people need to know/care what I’m doing every 4 minutes, there are lots of reasons to tweet, but do be aware that it is, in fact, public.

• If need be, create one “professional” twitter account that makes you look studious and mature, and another where you can tweet things like “omg SO hungover for interview this morning; hope they didn’t notice”

Gmail:

• Ever notice how random people you emailed once show up on your chat list? Yeah, you show up on theirs too. Careful with your gmail status.

Hope I didn’t ruin your spring break… have eco-friendly fun, and enjoy the time off before you get back to the grind of jobsearching.

Oh, and looking for a cool summer gig?
Check out these opportunities to take charge on a green project:
http://www.grandaspirations.org/index.html (Nationwide)
http://www.green.dc.gov/green/cwp/view,a,1233,q,461478.asp (Washington, D.C.)