Does Your Social Media Paint The Right Picture?

With everything comes positives and negatives. It’s a normal thing that happens in life and so , in as much as we expect things to go well, we should also expect things to go awry.

Social media as we all know has so many advantages and so does it have its disadvantages. Once, I watched a TikTok video and the lady in the video was all happy about how she got a job with some institution. She went on to make fun of other people in a nice way and all of that. From what I heard, that company keeps their staff information and other stuff anonymous. It’s more like what they do is coded. Less than 24 hours later, people saw her video and reported her to the company she got a job with. Long story short, she lost the job even before she started. That wasn’t enough, she came back on TikTok again announcing that she lost the job and proceeded to advise people not to put their stuff online.

I always say that whatever you put out there on social media can make or break you. There are people who are social media influencers and they make money from the work they do on social media. When you see people coming out to insult others, companies and all of that, something should tell you that they’re getting something from it. But ‘yaanom’ (normal people) like us will now follow them and be trolling others. Whatever you put out there on social media is being monitored by so many people. Don’t think that because you’re not a celebrity no one is watching you, you are being watched.

When it comes to the hiring of employees at the work place, I believe that it is important to go through the applicants social media pages to know who they really are online but this should be done without their knowledge. Most people engage in so many activities online and some of these things they do are not something you’d approve of as a company. I get that someone may say that’s their personal life. It’s their personal life but whatever your employees do out there in their personal lives affects you the company even though you have no role in that.

Your employees represent your company and what you stand for. You wouldn’t want to work with people who will go out there and tarnish the image of your company. In Africa where I come from, once someone attributed to a particular company or organization does something unacceptable, they tag it to their organization and that’s how you’d eventually loose all your customers.

Even though an employees social media activity shouldn’t play a hundred percent role in their hiring process, it’s very important to look into it. Imagine Facebook hiring someone who’s always insulting their app. It wouldn’t even make sense for something like this to happen. Some people would say they didn’t mean it but, if you didn’t mean something why did you say it. This a question we should all ask ourselves before going out to post stuff on social media.

all images belong to me.