Should Employers Judge Our Digital Tattoos?

In my last blog post, I talked about digital tattoos and the benefits of letting companies get to know us. I very briefly mentioned that many employers screen candidates by looking at their social media accounts. Now I want to go deeper into that. Should employers be judging us based on our digital tattoos?

During a class discussion, a fellow student said that screening candidates' social media pages would be looking for trouble where there is none because what we do outside of work doesn't affect our employment and never has. That got me thinking. People have always kept their personal lives separate from their professional lives, and for good reason. How many habits do we have at home or around our friends that would not look good on the job? An intelligent, talented CEO could have a gambling problem. A successful doctor might've spent some time in rehab in his past. Employers looking into our personal lives by looking at our social media pages are probably going to find something they don't personally like, and that could cost us a job. For example, my grandmother always talks about how where she's from, qualified people sometimes don't get hired because they belong to a different political party than the person who's hiring. That sounds petty to me.

How many other seemingly superficial factors go into hiring a person? In 2013, Forbes posted an article about the things employers are looking for when they screen our social media pages. In 2014, Time posted a similar article. Most of the qualifications in these articles make sense. They look for references to drugs or alcohol, profanity and prejudice, and improper grammar to make sure they're not hiring anyone dangerous or uneducated. There were a couple of things, however, that I don't think they should be looking for, including political affiliation (as I previously mentioned) and personality. Those are personal factors that shouldn't affect our ability to do a job right. I know it's easier to work with someone you like and get along with, but if a person has ideas you don't agree with but is good at what they do, I think they should still be hired.

Going back to what this classmate of mine said, some of the things employers find on our social media pages that they don't like are often blown out of proportion. For example, if a candidate has posted a few status updates about going to the bar or club, does that make them an alcoholic or a wild, irresponsible party-goer? If another candidate often shares political articles or is really passionate about a cause that his or her potential employer is against, will that necessarily cause tension or arguments in the workplace? Let's say a candidate has actual tattoos; does that make him or her untrustworthy or a bad employee? There are things we do in personal lives, things we're passionate about, that have nothing to do with how we conduct ourselves in the workplace, so we shouldn't be judged by them.

Along that line, what about mistakes? We all make them, especially on social media. I, personally, cringe when I read old posts I made in the beginning of high school, full of bad grammar that I thought was cool back then or talking about irrelevant drama that had no business being brought up online. But I've grown up since then. How far back should employers look on our social media pages? I really don't think we should be judged for a position based on mistakes we've made or old habits we had. While our digital tattoos say a lot about us and help employers get to know us, I think they should take everything they see with a grain of salt and not judge us so harshly, as long as we do well in other parts of the application process.