Tuesday, May 22, 2012

What to do when your Boss Friends you on Facebook! The Answer to this and Five other Social Media Career Problems



 Good morning blogosphere, twitterverse, Facebookians and all of you others out there.  I hope you are having a terrific week leading up to a three day weekend!  Things are going terrific here in the Thompson household.  Baby Kai is almost sleeping through the night, we are getting our new puppy next wee and I’m very proud to report that my oldest daughter, Ava, caught her first fish this weekend!

I'm such a proud Papa!!!


As you all know I’ve become a pretty big proponent of harnessing social media to help your career.  However, as with anything terrific, there are drawbacks.  Social media can be a huge headache for your career.  Today I’m going to talk about six situations that can cause problems in your career and how to handle them.  Here we go!

1.  Your Boss Friends You on Facebook
This is such a tricky situation.  When you get the message that Mr. Burns wants to be your friend on Facebook, many of you start asking why.  Is he checking up on me? Did I do something wrong?  Is there something on my profile I should be afraid of?  If I say no will he feel disrespected or have his feelings hurt?  These are all valid concerns.

What do you do when this guy friends you?  It's probably innocent...

 First of all, lets talk about why your boss is friending you.  The most likely reason is because they like you.  You need to remember that for some people Facebook is this addicting  platform where people collect connections to make them feel better about themselves.  Everyone has a different filter for what they call a friend on Facebook.  I would wager that 95% of the time they are just being friendly.  However, having your boss on there does pose some problems.  What if there is stuff you don’t want him to see…

So…you have two options:

  • Say Yes – you can do this if you think it would hurt their feelings to say no.  Also it is probably easiest solution provided that your profile doesn’t have anything embarrassing on it. 
  • Say No – This is the hardest one, but you can do this and preserve your relationship with your boss.  What you need to do is to find a time to talk to them alone and explain to them that to you Facebook is a private thing and that you only use it to connect to very close friends and family.  They will most likely understand that unless… you are friends with everyone else in the office.  If that is the case you either need to roll the dice and risk making them mad or just accepting them and cleaning up your profile.

2.  You have co-workers or friends that post inappropriate thing on your wall
This is a really common problem.  There are some people out there – you probably don’t know who you are – that either just like to complain or have no filter – by no filter I mean they have absolutely no capacity to understand what is appropriate to share with everyone or not.  You know these people – they typically say something wrong and when you look at them funny they say –What?  If you know these people like I do – please know I’m not condemning you – you can’t change them.  It’s in their DNA.  These are the friends that think it is hilarious to tag a picture of you they snapped at 3 AM with a great caption telling the world what you did.  So what do you do?  You can try talking to them about it – this probably wont’ work.  You can also de-friend them but nobody likes drama.  There is a pretty simple solution here.  Go to Facebook’s privacy settings and click on edit settings for Timeline and Tagging – in here there is an option for you to review posts that you are tagged in before they appear in your timeline.  This will help you screen it.

3.  You Interview for a Job and the Hiring Manager connects to you on LinkedIn or Facebook

This one is a little trickier and each network poses a different problem.  If the hiring manager  does this on Facebook it is most likely because they are checking up on you.  Most companies don’t do this because of liability issues but some do it on purpose.  This shouldn’t be a problem if you have already been proactive about cleaning up your Facebook page.  However, it still might feel like an invasion of your privacy.  In this case I suggest thinking long and hard about how much you want this job.  If you really want it then maybe it is a hoop you should jump through.  If you are on the fence…just ignore it and move on.  If you are asked about it just say that you aren’t on Facebook very much and hadn’t checked it yet. 

LinkedIn is only tricky because it is a professional forum and most likely you are connected to your boss.  It might look suspicious if you take a morning off and later that day adding a connection from a competitor.  If you are uncomfortable accepting the invite then send the person an email and explain your situation – tell them that your boss is a suspicious person that micro manages you and that it would be problematic to accept them immediately.  Suggest that you will connect to them in the future.  At the end of the day, the biggest concern you have here is that you inadvertently offend someone by not accepting their invitation.  A little bit of communication will go a long way.

4.  Your Facebook Profile is Unsavory
Here’s the deal.  Try as you might it is really hard to hide all aspects of your Facebook profile.  The internet is literally a vast blackhole of opportunities to hurt your career if you allow the wrong information to get out there.  Before you post something or accept to have a picture of you tagged think about what a future employer might think.  Better yet use this rule of thumb:

“Would I be embarrassed if my Mom saw this?”

Make your momma proud!


For all of you with hardcore partying moms – please just go with the example and replace mom with some other easily offendable relative that you don’t want to upset.  Just be careful – it can hurt you.  For more on this read the end of this article I wrote earlier this year:


5.  Your Resume Doesn’t Match Your Profile
This is a big area that catches people up.  Many people choose to have an abbreviated version of their resume on LinkedIn.  They leave out information that isn’t important or unflattering in order to make themselves appear more marketable.  This in itself isn’t a problem.  Your profile is a walking advertisement that should make you look good.  However, you need to make sure that important information matches up.   Say you worked for a company for six months and it is on your resume.  Some people embellish their LinkedIn profile and add that time to a longer job to make them appear more stable.  This is a big turnoff.  Instead of embellishing just make sure that the dates add up and leave the less important stuff off.  Don’t lie – even if it is unintentional you can seriously hurt your career.

6.  Employer asks for your Facebook or LinkedIn log in information
This is a practice that is somewhat common in certain industries.  Essentially some companies feel that this is a valid way to conduct a reference.  I’m not going to levy my judgment on the practice on this one.  Honestly, how I feel about it doesn’t really matter – it doesn’t help people get jobs.  Instead, I’ll tell you how to deal with it.  You have two options:

  1. Scrub your profile and give them log in – this depends on how much you need the job
  2. Take a moral stand and walk away – if you feel that this is an invasion of your privacy you should politely say that you aren’t  comfortable giving out this information and ask if there are any alternative solutions.  If they say no (companies with this policy most likely will), then tell them politely that you would like to remove yourself from consideration.

Please understand that the key here is to be polite.  It is a very small world out there and no matter how egregious the request of a potential employer you need to be gracious in your negative response.  If you have a strong impression and tell them how you really feel the run the risk that it will be misconstrued to others in the industry. 

So there you go – it’s a strange new world we are living in!  What do you think?  Please feel free to leave comments or email me at sthompson@insurance-csg.com.

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