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Hiring in the Age of Twitter

By Kathy Barton, April 1, 2009

In a past life at a company that shall remain nameless, an employee made the mistake of hitting "reply all" to a corporate announcement instead of forward. Her reply went, not to her close friend as she intended, but to the whole company. While embarrassing, this would not have been a career-limiting move except for the fact that the reply detailed her job search and her urgent desire to get out of her current (insert uncomplimentary adjective here) job.

This led to her dismissal, a highly controversial move, since she was well liked and very good at her job. The point of this article is not to debate the decision, but to simply say: we ain't seen nothing yet. The plethora of social media tools now available, from Facebook to MySpace to Twitter, has led to an extraordinary blending of personal and professional lives in a very public forum which too many people seem to think is private. The latest casualty of this trend is the unfortunate "Cisco Fatty," a candidate who left her interview at Cisco and sent out the following tweet: "Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work."

A Cisco employee saw the tweet and tweeted back: "Who is the hiring manager. I'm sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web." A Twitter tempest was born, with the candidate labeled a (insert uncomplimentary noun here) who stupidly tweeted herself out of a job in an economy where jobs are not easy to find. An Internet posse pounced, revealing the candidate's personal information and creating a website called www.ciscofatty.com, even though the candidate changed her privacy settings and deleted the tweet. In fact, if you Google "Cisco Fatty" you get 255,000 hits, including a YouTube video called "Hitler and the Cisco Fatty" which is a riot but definitely NSFW (Not Suitable For Work). Keep in mind this incident happened on March 17th, so these 255,000 references have all been created in the past two weeks.

The next day the Cisco employee tweeted: "Lots of new followers today. I wonder why. Be careful what you say, and have a great day." The candidate wrote a blog post explaining that the job was an internship she'd already turned down, that the tweet was a joke, and that it was only intended for the 45 friends that follow her. Cisco took the high road with a posted statement explaining they don't comment on personnel issues and included these words of wisdom:

A common statement in the public relations world has always been "don't say it unless you are comfortable with it being on the front page of a newspaper." Now, with Twitter, the world is coming to understand something new: "don't say it, unless you want it turned into a meme and hashtags and websites and videos, etc." You obviously never know what is going to go viral, but it would be a shame if that fear kept people from communicating through these important new forums.

Words are powerful and you have to be willing to stand behind those words or be ready to defend them. Maybe we all already knew this, but with Twitter and social media and new ways to communicate, maybe "re-learning" isn't a bad thing.

There has been a lot written decrying the tendency of social media users to post opinions ranging from the political to the personal in language and images that don't present them in a positive light to prospective employers. Or, for that matter, to their current employer, as illustrated by the Philadelphia Eagles stadium employee and lifelong Eagles fan fired by the team after posting a negative comment on Facebook about a personnel move. Part of this is just ignorance - people think of Twitter as a private conversation with friends because many use it for replies to people they follow, like IM. However, unless you have protected updates, everyone can see your tweet. Part of it is cultural - users of these tools become accustomed to communicating with friends this way and simply forget that (a) what they are posting is essentially public, and (b) once on the Internet, forever on the Internet.

What I'm wondering is if companies are taking this opportunity to learn by example rather than experience. What if the tweeter in the Cisco example had been a hiring manager making a negative comment about a candidate? What if the tweet had been from a rejected candidate commenting on something negative about the hiring process or an inappropriate question in an interview? Best-in-class recruiting organizations have been focused on the candidate experience and on treating candidates with respect for some time now, but the stakes just got a lot higher. A poorly-treated candidate is in a position to easily communicate their experience to very large audience almost instantaneously. Now is the time for top recruiting organizations to take the following steps to ensure that their 15 minutes of fame aren't similar to the 15 minutes just experienced by "Cisco Fatty":

1. Make sure you have a clearly defined hiring process, that the process is clearly described on your career website, and that every application is acknowledged and treated with respect.
   
   
2. Make sure that your recruiters and hiring managers understand that social media is a public venue and as Cisco says above, words are powerful and you need to be willing to stand behind them.
   
   
3. Train your hiring managers on how to appropriately interview candidates. If you use a methodology like Performance-based Hiring, not only will you get better hires, but your candidates will feel like they were treated professionally.

In our modern world, sometimes the old lessons are the best: treat your candidates the way that you would like to be treated if you were in their shoes. It may make it less likely that you will be.