Why Social Media Profile Links Always Belong on Your Resume
Posted: Thu Jan 23, 2025 5:55 am
Many articles have been written warning about social media’s impact on the job search relying on the blurred lines between personal and professional information to make their point. With a predilection towards possible negative outcomes, the prevailing default advice favors hiding social media activities from potential employers. This perspective and the prevailing analysis is dated, misplaced and inevitably leads to irrelevant outcomes.
By comparison, understanding the distinction between private versus public information provides a better backdrop for the contextual argument and offers concrete guidance for all of us to follow when it comes to using social media for career advantage.
In her recent article “Do Your Social Profiles Belong on Your Resume?” published at Social-Hire.com, Adrienne Erin argues that “pointing hiring managers to your social media profiles is not necessarily a good idea.” In support of her romania phone number library argument she states: “Your resume should be as concise and to-the-point as possible, and listing your social media profiles will take up valuable space. Most of our social accounts are also personal, not for business, so putting them on the resume is often irrelevant.“
Addressing Adrienne’s last point first, whenever we post to social media we are essentially publishing that information for public consumption. You should consider anything posted online to be “public” no matter what your “privacy” settings are.Wikipedia defines social media as “the interaction among people in which they create, share, and/or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks.” Therefore, whether the posting is professional, political, religious, familial, sexual, sophomoric or intellectual in nature, by voluntarily placing it in the public domain via social media, we are sharing that information with others and it becomes a part of our individual discoverable public record.
Each one of us has every opportunity to keep our personal thoughts, beliefs and experiences private and off the public record by simply choosing not to post them to social media. Once posted, however, building a fence around what is personal versus what is professional is virtually impossible. Can we rationally rely on the Internet to properly filter, categorize and respect public posts of personal information? Of course not.
By comparison, understanding the distinction between private versus public information provides a better backdrop for the contextual argument and offers concrete guidance for all of us to follow when it comes to using social media for career advantage.
In her recent article “Do Your Social Profiles Belong on Your Resume?” published at Social-Hire.com, Adrienne Erin argues that “pointing hiring managers to your social media profiles is not necessarily a good idea.” In support of her romania phone number library argument she states: “Your resume should be as concise and to-the-point as possible, and listing your social media profiles will take up valuable space. Most of our social accounts are also personal, not for business, so putting them on the resume is often irrelevant.“
Addressing Adrienne’s last point first, whenever we post to social media we are essentially publishing that information for public consumption. You should consider anything posted online to be “public” no matter what your “privacy” settings are.Wikipedia defines social media as “the interaction among people in which they create, share, and/or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks.” Therefore, whether the posting is professional, political, religious, familial, sexual, sophomoric or intellectual in nature, by voluntarily placing it in the public domain via social media, we are sharing that information with others and it becomes a part of our individual discoverable public record.
Each one of us has every opportunity to keep our personal thoughts, beliefs and experiences private and off the public record by simply choosing not to post them to social media. Once posted, however, building a fence around what is personal versus what is professional is virtually impossible. Can we rationally rely on the Internet to properly filter, categorize and respect public posts of personal information? Of course not.