to tell you to warn your teenagers about Twitter?

[MyMannateeBringsTheBoystotheYa]

Seriously.

I have a young person helping me as part of a volunteer role for his degree. He is 19. I knew this person's name and surname before they came to work for me. Like literally his name is the first to come up on google and it's to an old and new twitter account.

The old one was full of teen angst. No worries there, I mean thank fuck twitter wasn't around when I was a teenager for all my ramblings to still be available for the world to see.

The current one.. was a bit sweary and a bit cringey and a bit whiny about partners and who really loves who forever and ever and ever and ever and how XXX will always come back etc.

I was a bit bored yesterday and looked him up yesterday (to see if he mentioned working at mine). And holy god, there appears to be some sort of Twitter shit storm of epic proportions kicking off. With swearing at friends, immature comments back and forth, accusations of faked pregnancies.... the back and forth was between like 5 people too, not just the main 2 who were upset with each other. Him and his friends are actually including other people in their "tweets" so they can see the arguing. I mean what the fuck?

I know I'm clearly out of touch, but if I were an employer and saw this I would not touch this person with a barge pole.

He is in the process of looking for a job and seems perfectly polite and contentious while working for me (so far).. but this won't look good to prospective employers.

Now I am awaiting the inevitable shrieking about "snooping" but the truth is Twitter is a publishing site. It is their for making your voice heard and if you aren't happy with it being read you don't publish it). Employers do check social media and haven't got to worry about the ethical dilemma so the fact remains people need to keep their online lives from mixing with their off line lives especially as most of their employers won't be other teenagers.

Yanbu, I see things on FB too that shouldn't be up there for (even friends) to see...

I think you are right. the stuff that goes on on FB and Twitter which is out there for all to see forever is shocking.

Teens especially seems to think they are invincible for some reason. However there are a fair few adults whose pages are

It's not just teenagers, some adults need to be reminded of this. When I get a jibmy future employer will see that I both like to complain and to complement companies. Oh and I like to re-tweet science news haha

I always have a poke around social media when reviewing job applications. And then I realised that others were probably doing the same to me. Cue massive overhaul of my FB/Twitter.

I am so glad DS1 has FB but rarely posts. Any future employer may think he is a footy bore though.

I think the average teenager could probably warn us far more effectively

People are ever so stupid about things they publish online under their own name.

My DSD (14) has Twitter, Instagram etc; (not FB) and we don't monitor it at all, but DSS (16) once told me that one of his friends went off on one recently about his summer job employer (a big kids camp thing), which I can't see being good for getting a job next year tbh!

I will say I was pleasantly surprised with the spelling and grammar of all of those involved though.. if that makes it any better.

Dh is 40 and and of his old friends from school "& all of Hs fRnds wrte lIk dis" I h8 it

Unless you are a celebrity or promoting something you should up the privacy settings on your tweets and any other social media.

Luckily my children and I all have completely googleproof names. Just googled myself and DS1 (both of us have twitter accounts) and found nothing, because there are dozens of more self-promoting interesting people with the same name.

My boss follows me on Twitter, the awareness of which keeps me in check. All DS1's tweets come as notifications to my phone and they have been very boring so far.

I have the same (unusual) username for Twitter, ebay and MyFitnessPal. It is different from any I use on Mumsnet. When I put that username into google, the results are as follows:

1. My ebay account
2. My Twitter acount
3. My MFP account (details of which thankfully not visible to the public)
4. A list of favourite YouTube videos from a YouTube member with that username who isn't me!!!

I never post anything under my actual name that I wouldn't be ok with an employer or my grandma reading.

But I guess even in anonymous screen names I don't really post anything incriminating about myself. I normally treat people online the same way I do offline.

BTW landlords check too.

I only come up on linkedin, 192.com, peopleperhour, and www.locatemyname.com

I cringe when I see what comes up on my name. I was a teen with Internet access. The worst bit is a girl claiming that I hacked into her blogging. What she didn't realise was that if I knew how to hack into an account, that post wouldn't be there anymore. I've asked the site to remove it as I work in people's homes but they haven't and ignore any contact I make. She won't remove it either the bitch. The rest is just normal teen crap really!

I don't come up anywhere

My DC are very weary about what they post on Twitter. DS1 has an offer from the Army and is already aware they do occasionally look on there.

DS2 wants to be a nurse and we have no idea if the Uni's have a sneaky peak on there. However, we do know of a girl who fits all the criteria for nursing on paper but has just been turned down again, for the third time, by all the universities she has applied for. She tweets all the time about how ill she is, how many problems she has, how she has to take another day off work, how anxious she is. Her twitter is like a car crash and I do wonder if they look before they offer or not.

*wary not weary!

Absolutely - we do blind recruitment for our graduate entrants, so as a manager I get a pack of information about candidates including interview write-ups, application forms, results of tests etc but it is all anonymised to avoid any bias (so no names or mention of gender, age, ethnicity anywhere) to select who I want on my team. Even on the basis of this anonymised information I was given (in particular study and work history) and the help of google I found out the name of my new recruit, a photo of him, his twitter feed (and therefore his political preferences, favourite eating haunts and the football team he supported). Fortunately it was all pretty tame but it did scare him when I mentioned in passing the first time I met him that he must have been pleased his team was promoted.

And my brother, who works in PR, was once told at an interview that they had seen his fb page and could see he enjoyed a good time. Fortunately the job he applied for required lots of schmoozing with clients and doing silly stunts so he got the job.

I don't have a social media presence beyond a linkedin account and a fb account which I restrict to very close family and friends and only post the occasional photo of my children. Both of which I would more than happy for a future employer to scrutinise. I wouldn't want my children to have any social media presence until they understand what impact it could have on future employment.

I do think it's worth reminding him that anyone can see twitter. I had similar conversation with a godchild recently.

As an employer, I'm not interested in snooping and I expect staff to have active social lives etc. I even expect them to share on social network sites. However, I also expect them to use judgement and manage privacy settings or limit what they post in public.

So I do cursory searches at recruitment stage. I'm delighted when I find my access blogged and posts private and worried when I don't.

FairyCaravan I would be cautious of someone who had a twitter feed like the one you mention!

I never post anything under my actual name that I wouldn't be ok with an employer or my grandma reading.

This ^^

I have an unusual name but even so, there's very little of me on the web to find. FB privacy settings high and it doesn't come up in a search. I have linkedin, but that's limited to my past and present jobs, and a couple of extras such as the voluntary work I do. There's a couple of bits where I've been complimentary about DD's old primary school and and old address comes up on 192.com.

That's it, as I'm very cautious, and teaching the DCs the same.

What teens do need to know is that nothing is ever fully deleted from the web. I know there's a project that's been backing up the entire web regularly, probably every day.

And that's just the one I know about. I would bet that the US, Chinese and Russian Govts, to name the obvious ones, do exactly the same.

Nothing is ever lost online. If you don't want it to coma back and haunt you, don't post.

Both my DCs use nicknames for twitter and Instagram which have no connection to their actual names and a "social media" email address again not connected.

I recruit for my department and I absolutely google prospective employees names.

We work for a company where we are actually advised very strongly not to have any accounts in our actual names and if we do, to make sure they are respectable because our clients do check up on the account managers social networking profiles.

We are forbidden from mentioning the company we work for on FB and/or discussing specific work situations.