We live in a world where a human being can seldom control his/her exposure to the public eye. It isn’t easy to keep secrets any more, and they say anything once posted on the internet lingers there forever.
I wrote earlier about how close we are to a world where a manager gets information about prospective employees from his/her colleagues and former managers (and vice versa), through leveraging social media. On the one hand, it makes it easy for a manager to do the screening process, and prepare himself and his team for the arrival of the new team member. Similarly, an employee can prepare himself before joining a new organization or a new team, based on the opinion of people who have had some kind of experience at the place. But this gives rise to two possibilities that needs immediate attention.
I wrote earlier about how close we are to a world where a manager gets information about prospective employees from his/her colleagues and former managers (and vice versa), through leveraging social media. On the one hand, it makes it easy for a manager to do the screening process, and prepare himself and his team for the arrival of the new team member. Similarly, an employee can prepare himself before joining a new organization or a new team, based on the opinion of people who have had some kind of experience at the place. But this gives rise to two possibilities that needs immediate attention.
Firstly, whoever seeks opinions through social media must have a clear idea of who to trust and who not to trust. Untrustworthy sources can wreak havoc with the process and the seeker may end up with a grossly contorted result. Given the very nature of social media, a filtration process may not be that simple to implement effectively.
Secondly, as I mentioned before, it is said that anything once posted on the internet lingers there forever. We have read plenty of stories with the same moral, each citing a case where someone was terminated from a job/rejected at a job interview due to embarrassing photographs uploaded on a social networking site. In a business context, what is ‘embarrassing’ for an organization may be very different from what an individual might choose to keep hidden. The essence here is, social media may have drastically reduced our margin for error – one mistake made long ago may come back any time to haunt an organization or even an individual as long as it exists on the web.
No comments:
Post a Comment