4 Social Media Mistakes That Can Hurt Your Job Search

Maybe you badmouthed a coworker or openly mocked your customers. In this case, remember the adage: The customer is always right. Remove the post immediately.

Employers want a team player, a professional, not someone who airs dirty laundry. This means give your social media activity a thorough audit, including older posts, comments, likes and photos.

3. Bad spelling, plagiarism

Poor spelling and grammar aren’t as easy to scrub off your timeline.

Details matter. You may not realize you’re mixing up “their,” “there” and “they’re.” If you’re lucky, a potential boss will be forgiving on leaving out punctuation or having miscellaneous typos.

A 2021 survey from Jobvite, an Indianapolis-based software provider for recruiting and hiring, found that 45 percent of recruiters consider it a turnoff to see a candidate use poor spelling and grammar. That was No. 1 of its Top 5 with references to marijuana, alcohol consumption, politics and pictures of body parts showing skin rounding out the list.

Informal acronyms don’t impress. Avoid using texting language in your social feeds. brb, be right back; icymi, in case you missed it; and smh, shaking my head, are fine in a text. But if you’re posting something, especially on a professional platform like LinkedIn, use more formal English. Otherwise, it could imply laziness.

Twitter is particularly tough, because you have a limited number of characters to use. But in the future if you have a longer statement to make, you can write what you want to say in a Word or other text document, take a screenshot and attach it to your tweet.

Remember that posting something someone else wrote to social media is acceptable only if you give credit. Passing off something as yours means you may be called out on it, and it could hurt your career. Cite the author, link to the article you’re quoting and attribute the photographer’s work you’re posting.

4. Oversharing

We all have friends who post everything on social media: their favorite latte foam art, a fun goat yoga class or every Pioneer Woman recipe ever published. Their minute-to-minute photo libraries of vacation advertise an empty house back home.  

What does this have to do with a new job? Sometimes things shouldn’t be shared on social media, such as the amount of your bonus or information about a new marketing campaign not yet launched. You don’t want a potential employer to think you have a habit of posting private company business for others to see.

An acquaintance of mine once prematurely posted about a job just scored. The employer rescinded the offer after seeing the post because a confidentiality agreement was violated and the hire was deemed untrustworthy.

Face it. You don’t want to lose the job before your first day.

Start with a clean house

If you’re certain your social media posts are OK, go through them anyway to see if anything stands out. Try to look at your posts from the perspective of a recruiter or potential employer.

Facebook, the most popular social media platform in the U.S., offers easy ways to delete posts with a feature called Manage Activity. It simplifies the deletion of posted content, both in bulk and individually, all in one place.

And it allows you to archive posts as opposed to deleting them, should you not want the photo of you 20 years younger and 40 pounds lighter to go away forever. Think of it as being held in a digital purgatory, behind the scenes.

The deletion process varies on each social platform, so be sure to review previous activity on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and other channels you frequent.

Police your followers

A more aggressive approach is to tighten your social network reach to limit what your potential employer sees. Every social platform will let you shrink your circle of friends or followers, but don’t let that keep you from cleaning house. Someone still can take a screenshot or show your potential employer something you wrote.

When in doubt, ask a partner or a friend if something is suitable to keep on social media. A second opinion is never a bad idea.