You know people read your social media, right?

 

Today I noticed a couple of tweets from a young woman.

 

"My french boss must have a crush on me; he keeps calling me asking silly questions while he ignores everyone else..."

 

Her friends quickly jumped in, stating how the French were terrible people. How she was right, for sure, and the only reason for those calls was either because he had some sexual motivation or needed something from her.

 

The conversation involved some co-workers; none of them made any public attempt to have her stop and delete that particular conversation. Instead, some implied that her boss was probably reaching out and getting to know her a bit better.  

 

Now, stop for a second, consider what that particular french boss feels when he sees that Twitter thread. And he will. 

 

 

 

Two people that worked on the same company publicly started a conversation about the best approach to improve their CVs and LinkedIn profiles. Both had just a couple of months with their current employee. 

 

The comments to the original post were interesting, with some great suggestions added. So I decided to take a brief look into the history of changing companies of some of the participants. Pretty much all of them switched jobs every year since they started their careers.

 

These are young people, south of their 30s. They focus on how much they get paid and very little on what they did at their previous jobs. 

 

They did not seem particularly emotionally involved with the companies they worked at, nor did they imply something was wrong with those companies that convinced them to move. 

 

Why would their next employer feel that its company will be different to these particular young men? Why would they commit for longer this time around? 

 

Unless that employer is looking for short-term temporary talent to fill some gap, I fail to see how they are hirable. Chances are they will be making their next round of improvements to those CVs a few months after they join in and repeating the cycle once again.    

 

I know I look at people's work history before I hire them. It takes a couple of months to integrate a new employee into an IT team. Most people take quite a few months to make up for that initial investment and deliver some value. So if their history show they will be planning an exit strategy before even getting to that stage, is there any logical reason to hire them?     

 

 

 

I find myself unfollowing friends on Facebook to keep those friendships. Unfortunately, some create online "personas" that poorly reflect their real personalities. I know that person. While I utterly fail to understand the reasoning for such an appalling public display of stupidity, I see that it's just a poor choice of behavior limited to the social network.

 

Twitter seems to be even worse at bringing out that spontaneous idiotic comment from people. Yet, somehow the illusion that whatever your actions on Twitter are, they stay on Twitter; seems to be prevalent. Well, Twitter is not Vegas. And I am not sure the Vegas saying still applies in the current world of cell phones and social media. 

 

On LinkedIn people should know better!

 

 

 

 

This article was published on Medium (I am a subscriber and highly recommend it).