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The user must delete, item by item, every individual wall post, every group membership, every photo, and everything else. If a job application might be compromised by the presence of a Facebook profile, clearing the slate is possible, albeit with some hard labor. The website does allow the option of deactivating one’s account, but “Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely (Aspan, 2008).” It is a double-edged sword: On one hand, users who become disillusioned and quit Facebook can come back at any time and resume their activity on the other, one’s information is never fully deleted. Ran an article, “How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free”-a title that seems at once like a warning and a big-brother taunt. In 2008, as Facebook was quickly gaining momentum, The content on social networking sites like Facebook, where people use the Internet to meet new people and maintain old friendships, is nearly indestructible and may not actually belong to the user. Instead of showing a complete stranger your pictures from a recent party, it might be a better idea to hide those pictures and replace them with a well-written blog-or a professional-loo king website. Your presence online can be the equivalent of your first words to a brand-new acquaintance. Fir st im pre ssi ons are an im por tan t thi ng to kee p in min d whe n mak ing an onl ine per son a pro fes sio nal ly acceptable. Someone in charge of hiring could search the Internet for information on potential new hires even before calling references. Those online photos may not look bad to friends and family, but one’s online persona may be a hiring manager’s first impression of a prospective employee. The ubiquity of Web 2.0 social media like Facebook and T witter allows anyone to easily start developing an online persona from as early as birth (depending on the openness of one’s parents)-and although this online persona may not accurately reflect the individual, it may be one of the first things a stranger sees. If the first thing that comes up is a Flickr album (an online photo album from the photo-sharing site Flickr) from last month’ s Olympian-themed cocktail party, it may be a good idea to make that album private to ensure that only friends can view the album. This could entail “Googling”-shorthand for searching on Google-their own name to see the search results. However, there is a new step that is now an integral part of this application process-hiding (or at least cleaning up) the applicants’ virtual selves. After all, everyone applying for a particular job is going through this same process, and b arring great disas ters, the chances of s omething parti cularly negative reaching the desk of a hiring manager are not that great. The hiring manager understands that this is a biased view, designed to make the applicant look good, but that is all forgivable. It used to be that applying for a job was fairly simple: send in a resume, write a cover letter, and call a few references to make sure they will say positive things.
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