New service for job
seekers can help make a better impression on prospective employers You can
search for terms on their `undesirable content' list (or use keywords of your
own) to find things you've done that you might regret, resulting in `a newer,
cleaner you'
Before a college graduate goes job
hunting, he or she will probably do a few things: prepare a good resume, be
ready to answer some key questions about his or her skills and
qualifications, buy some nice clothes.
There's another task you might
find yourself adding to your pre-interview to-do list if a new company,
Social Sweepster, has its way: scanning and scrubbing your Facebook and
Twitter pages for pictures and other posts that might make a prospective
employer think twice about offering you a job.
Origins and competition Tom McGrath, a graduate of Indiana University's class of 2013, saw an opportunity to help job seekers find potentially damaging material on their social media accounts using so-called computer vision technology, and so he founded Social Sweepster. While he hasn't been alone in devising services to help people on the job market tidy up their Facebook and Twitter accounts, Social Sweepster offers something that the competition hasn't yet matched: attention not only to text but also to photos.
Two other companies say they can
search your social media accounts for things that might raise red flags when
you're hunting for a job. SimpleWash scans your Facebook and Twitter accounts
for keywords that might point to objectionable material. You can search for
terms on their “Undesirable content“ list (or use keywords of your own
devising) to find things you've said that you might regret, resulting in what
the service promises will be “a newer, cleaner you“, at least online.
Another company, Socially Clean,
says it will analyse your Facebook profile and the posts you've made on your
friends' pages, helping you delete posts until you “ensure that your Facebook
page has a Socially Clean Rating of 100%“.
But while both services can read
the text posted with pictures on Facebook or Twitter, neither can analyse the
photos themselves. After years of using Facebook, Twitter and other social
media services in high school and college, many people have either posted or
been tagged in many online pictures, often with little in the way of
scannable captions. McGrath says that finding potentially problematic images
associated with your identity online would be easier if his computers did the
work for you, and offers this capability as his competitive edge.
How it works
I f you grant Social Sweepster
access to your Facebook or Twitter accounts, it begins scanning your
timelines as far back as 2005. Its filters will un earth pictures containing
objects determined with a high degree of confidence to be potentially
objection able.
The technology goes searching for
beer cans or bottles or the red cups that are ubiquitous at any college party
and flags the individual images that contain them. You can then click through
to the image on Facebook to delete it, untag yourself or ask a friend to make
it disappear. The service is in beta right now, and McGrath says the company
will let users sweep a few months of photos on their timelines for free
before charging for a lengthier scan.
The object recognition is not
perfect.
The first picture it selected was of my wife standing in front of a sign. A glare from the sign registered as a beer can. But the fourth image it flagged came from a fun night during graduate studies. The service determined with a confidence level of 64 per cent that a bottle of Indonesian beer in that picture was in fact a bottle of Indonesian beer. Will people pay for it? While Social Sweepster can help you screen some pictures that might be associated with your identity online, how many people will actually be willing to pay for it? The argument has recently been advanced that oversharing has become the cultural norm, and businesses can no longer afford to screen out employees whose Facebook profiles are pasted with pictures of collegiate revelry because everyone does it.
McGrath was unfazed by that
argument. “If you spent all this money on a college education and you'll
spend $5 on a coffee, why not prevent the slightest chance that a potential
employer will be upset?“ he said. “We're providing additional insurance.“
-New York Times
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ETP140626
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