Nowadays, COVID-19 is not the only thing that spreads like wildfire. The once neighborhood-wide gossips now also travel 10 megabits per second thanks to social media. With the pandemic and travel restrictions that come with it, more people find themselves virtually logged in all day and all night.
The Gen Z’s are now using the slang word “teas” for gossips, and most people swamp on pages that serve them often as a form of entertainment. Dirty secrets are casually aired in public as a result of emotional whims. What was once limited by geography and space is now available to anyone all around the world.
There seems to be no limit to what strangers can access into one’s personal teas from cheating scandals, wild lifestyles, political exposes, family dramas, and even piling personal debts. While laws exist to prevent fake news from spreading, I would like to take the direction of employability. Should these people, who are the source of teas or involved in publicly washed dirty laundries, be dropped if they seek employment?
Recruiting and hiring is one of the essential roles of HR professionals. Choosing a person to fill a job in a company is like selecting the food that would sustain the body. It is natural for HR professionals and business owners to stay away from the stale and the rotten. For this reason, it is not surprising for them to conduct background checks.
In an article released by The Manifest, a survey in 2020 revealed that 90 percent of future employers check the social media of their job candidates. What is surprising is that a staggering 79 percent of these employers have rejected a potential applicant if the result of the social media background check is negative.
The same survey revealed that a candidate’s employment opportunity would be gravely affected if they found contents like drug use, heavy partying, hate or discriminatory speech, and even very poor grammar. Not so surprisingly, former employees who bad-mouth their previous employers or divulge confidential information do not help one’s employability at all, too.
Further, a 2018 study by Rosen et al. suggested using Twitter profiles to evaluate an individual’s personality and employability. The study mimicked “other-raters” such as HR professionals and how they would assess a candidate. They found that conscientiousness and agreeableness are some of the personalities that highly correlate to employability. Meaning, the personality tests that job applicants once took in assessment centers may now be done through social media.
Now that we have established how teas could affect one’s employability, what should be done? I believe that there is a compelling need to increase awareness of the impact of our social media posts on our current careers and future opportunities. Perhaps the main target of this awareness drive should be the new players in the workforce, the Millennials and the Gen Z’s.
While we millennials only served as ushers to the digital world, the Gen Z’s are the real “digital natives” born, cradled and raised in technology. Since the last of the millennials have probably finished college by now, the attention has shifted toward the Gen Z’s who are set to conquer the labor market soon.
Their hyper-connectivity to the digital world is quite apparent—hourly Twitter and Facebook status and daily Tiktok videos and Zoom classes. My profession has allowed me to observe first-hand these digital natives, and I would say that some of them hardly recognize a person-of-authority when they digitally communicate.
I have encountered some who write e-mails with a tone that is either commanding or extremely informal. The worst were the ones who do not even know how to use punctuations, let alone proper grammar but would dare use “audacity,” misogyny” and “aesthetic” in their Facebook captions.
For this reason, I believe that in addition to providing awareness about the dangers of impulsive social media posts to one’s career, we should also revisit the need to embed digital communication etiquette in the lens of HR and employability as a General Education Course. If this is not possible, then maybe we should prioritize activities that would promote these.
I remember being sold to the whole idea of additional school years and revamping the academic curriculum when I learned that the K to 12 transition aims to reduce job mismatch and increase employment rates.
Apparently, some college graduates are unemployed because they were over-qualified for actual available jobs. This, therefore, justifies the need to prepare students as early as senior high school for employability that is fit for the demands of the current times. We must not only prepare them for local employment, but also for global, borderless and technologically demanding job opportunities.
McKeon (2020) posited that while there is still a need to polish one’s resume and pitching skills, it has become imperative to pay attention to online employment profiles and personal websites. The same article stated that ensuring that profiles are Search Engine Optimized (SEO) may help in career success since 43 percent of employers use Google to know more about a candidate.
Undoubtedly, SEO is never heard of in traditional HR classes but is now a necessary skill in the world of digital repositories. Indeed, acknowledging the changes in the labor landscape is the first step in finding newer, better and more effective solutions. As Bill Gates once said, “Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react, and reinvent.” It is a reminder that adaptability to the changes happening around us is key to survival, even in employability.
The author is a full-time finance professor of Ateneo de Davao University and is currently a Doctor of Business Administration student at the Ramon V. Del Rosario College of Business-De La Salle University. You may contact her at bai_pandita@dlsu.edu.ph.
The views expressed above are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official position of DLSU, its faculty, and its administrators.