(FortunaAdmissions) Do you have photos on your Facebook profile of you in a drunken state? Or are you tagged in a photo taken a friend’s stag night where the pole dancing was clearly taking place somewhere other than Warsaw? Perhaps after a frustrating day at work you once took to Twitter to lash out at your boss. Maybe your
Whether you are applying to business school or applying for a job, it might be time to review your online presence and clean up any embarrassing albums and outbursts, and demonstrate your level of professional engagement. Poor judgement online can even affect you keeping your job - just ask New York PR executive Justine Sacco about the damage you can inflict on your career by tweeting.
Poles dancing - MBA applicants and job seekers need to review their online presence and clean up... [+]
The growing trend for recruiters to scrutinize the social media profiles of prospective employees has also been adopted by business schools. After speaking with various MBA admissions directors, they admit that although most schools do not have an official online screening policy and process in place, certain information they find about you on the internet can influence a school’s decision on your acceptance. So if you are applying for an MBA, or a new job, it is probably a good time to consider your online brand.
Social media continues to blur the lines between our personal and professional lives, and your activities online say a lot about our identity. Consequently, business schools and employers are interested to know if the profile you present in your application and resume is consistent with your identity in the market, at your workplace, and on social media. Your online footprint should be generally consistent with how you see your personal brand.
So here are 5 social media tips to consider before clicking ‘submit’ on your MBA application:
#1: Do a personal online audit. Scour the net with your name, starting with a
#2: If in doubt, delete. Review your history of posts, comments, and old photos on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, or any similar sites to see if you have anything viewable to the public that might reflect badly. Posts of a sexual nature, drug references, profanity, etc – may not go over well with an MBA admissions committee. While Facebook pages and Twitter profiles littered with spelling and grammar mistakes hardly inspires confidence about you as the great communicator.
Caroline Diarte Edwards, former admissions director at INSEAD explains, “Business schools are not going to screen out candidates for their political views (unless particularly extreme eg racist), for loving a good party, or for expressing the occasional gripe. On the other hand, admissions committees might raise an eyebrow if, for example, you have frequently expressed job frustration or if there is anything that suggests unprincipled behavior, such as making public fun of a colleague, or gloating about having hoodwinked a client.”
As a colleague at Fortuna Admissions, where we consult with clients on MBA applications, Caroline remembers a client who was out of work and had written on her blog about how she felt like a no-hoper. "Of course everyone can have moments of feeling down, but you do not want such statements to be viewed by the admissions office. So we advised her to delete that particular blog post.”
# 3: Make sure your LinkedIn profile is up-to-date and that you have joined the groups of the business schools you are applying to. You can take a step further and join the groups that are driving the debate in fields that you claim to be passionate about, such as impact investing, renewable energy or social enterprise. Schools also expect you to be a good networker, and having a well-developed LinkedIn profile can help to convey this image to an admissions committee. And don't forget an appropriate photo – the school can already start to picture you in their own yearbook.
Another Fortuna colleague and former Director of Admissions at Wharton, Judith Silverman Hodara recalls “When I was on the admissions committee at Wharton, it always surprised my team when MBA candidates sent us a polished resume, and then when we looked at their LinkedIn profiles they were…threadbare. Make sure your profiles are up-to-date as this is an ideal shop window to share your experience, skills, and knowledge. Your LinkedIn page should be professional, informative, and active, so use it!
#4: Start cultivating a more professional side on Facebook, Twitter, and similar platforms. Engage with your target schools (and alumni) by ‘following’ and ‘re-tweeting’ their twitter feeds and blogs, and 'liking' their Facebook pages. This will help you keep up-to-date and connected with the latest school news and will help deepen your knowledge of the institution. To advance your personal brand, you could even post intelligent, well-argued, and interactive comments to profile your thought leadership and get you noticed by the admissions committee. And if you get to the interview stage, your previous interaction may provide some good talking points.
#5: Consider changing your privacy settings. If in doubt, it may be worth changing your social media settings so that only a select group can see your past and future updates. Social media updates are often spontaneous, unfiltered statements and communicate how you feel at a particular moment in time. They are often used to let off steam. However, when they are left as a permanent record and are publicly available, remember that they become part of your personal branding. So if you are in the habit of making such spontaneous updates, it is recommended that you change your settings so that they are not available to someone outside of your immediate network.
At the end of the day there is no need to become paranoid and imagine that admission officers are going to spend hours checking out your blog archives and Facebook photos posted in 2008. They have a heavy workload, and in the majority of cases any online audit will most likely be quite brief. But you should err on the side of caution, and everything you put up on a social media site should be an accurate reflection of who you are as well as how you want to communicate your personal brand to the outside world.
And of course once you start business school, you will soon be thinking about summer internships and post-MBA employment plans. So you should continue to maintain a 'clean' social presence for future employers.
Don't let yourself be judged by your past when you are working so hard to build your future.
