career

Employers share the most bizarre things they've found when Googling potential employees.

If there's one thing employers get unique insight on, it's the intricacies of a potential employees' presence online.

Do they go out a lot? Do they have a habit of pouring their emotions onto their Facebook wall for the world to see and no one to respond to? More than that, what will their online presence say about their ability to perform the job they have applied for?

According to hiring managers, the answers can be quite illuminating.

We went down a rabbit hole on Reddit as well as asking our Mamamia audience for their experiences in this field. Specifically, when an employer has looked for a potential employee's social media and background, only to find some very weird, quirky and profoundly disturbing revelations.

Ultimately, this whole thread will make you want to do a deep clean and runthrough of your own online presence. 

Here's what these employers had to say. 

Watch: The star signs when there's a problem at work. Post continues below.


Video via Mamamia.

The one who wanted to be a role model but hadn't cleaned up her social media.

A Reddit user said they were hiring a private tutor to work with high school students:

"I had a great conversation with a potential employee who was a young female. She stressed how much she wanted to be a role model for young girls – basically exactly what we were looking for. Then I Googled her and the first picture on her Facebook was her doing a line of cocaine."

ADVERTISEMENT

The one you definitely don't want to hire.

"This kid, early 20s comes in for a job, seemed normal enough. Google him and he was wanted in another state for stabbing a dog to death."

The one who bagged out their future employer. 

"I used to work as a bar manager in hospitality a few years back. At the time, we had received lots of applications for a new bartender role. One of the girls I interviewed I thought was perfect. So my superior and I decided to check out her socials and type her name into Google just to see what came up. And through our 'research' I saw that she had left a terrible review on our bar's Google Review page. And it was bad... saying the workers were shocking and she would never return as a patron. I would have been one of those 'shocking workers'. It kind of made things awkward, and so we decided not to go with her," one woman told Mamamia:

Listen to 8 Minutes To Change Your (Work) Life. The one question you have to ask yourself before posting on social media. Post continues after audio.


The one whose police check came back dodgy.

One hiring executive shared with Mamamia that at their job at a prestigious school, they were looking for a replacement history teacher. After interviewing a range of candidates, one in particular looked like a good match. When she went to undergo the standard background checks, she realised the candidate was definitely not the right fit.

ADVERTISEMENT

"After doing some Googling and undergoing mandatory police checks for the candidate, we discovered that his working with children check had come back negative. It turns out he had previously engaged in some extremely unprofessional behaviour with two of his students. It was shocking. Needless to say he wasn't hired."

The one who chose jail over an interview.

One employer detailed the story of a guy they were looking to hire, who had a good enough CV to warrant an interview. He just never turned up for the interview.

"A couple of weeks later, there's an online story about him in the local paper. Turned out that he was living at the local boarding house, and was found in the kitchen one morning totally wasted, wearing nothing but a pair of socks. When a couple of women who also lived there tried to escort him back to his room, he got violent. Given the dates stated in the paper, he didn't turn up to our job interview because he'd been in jail at the time. His resume has now been added to the 'do not touch with a ten-foot barge pole' section in our filing cabinet."

The one whose search history was their downfall.

"So this was with an employee – although they had only been in the company for a few months. After noticing that their work wasn't really being done to a standard we expected, myself and our HR representative took the liberty to look at the employee's search history on their work device. In the contract it said this was a possibility, so it was ethically sound. What WASN'T ethically sound was this employee spending five hours of the workday scrolling through social media rather than doing their work. They didn't last long."

ADVERTISEMENT

Image: NBCUniversal Television. 

The one who was a creep. 

"I used to work at a University. We were hiring an academic, and he looked great for the role. But the day before we were about to offer him the job, we received a news alert that he had been arrested for exposing himself in public. It was an immediate 'throw the resume in the bin' moment," one manager told Mamamia. 

The one who 'spiced up' his resume.

"I once had a candidate list in their employment history that they were Director of Finance for a company I had never heard of. Resume looked good, nice and clean, good experience, great education, immaculate credential."

ADVERTISEMENT

Only there was one tiny problem. None of it was real.

"The company was real. When I checked up, it turns out it was the candidate's own company – it had no physical location, and didn't actually offer any product or service. The phone number went to a cell phone that was answered by an 'assistant', who it turns out was the candidate himself."

"None of the other companies he listed on his resume had any record of him ever working there. His plan must have been to dazzle us with his credentials, get a glowing recommendation from the 'CEO' of the 'company' he 'worked for,' and have us be so impressed we would just hire him without any due diligence," the employer continued. 

The one who had some questionable Facebook statuses.

"I used to work at a popular juice bar chain, and I was helping the team hire a new teenage worker to work the afternoon shifts. One potential candidate had given us her resume in person, and we had kept it on file. While flicking through the files, I found this particular girl's name and decided to look her up on Facebook as she looked familiar," one manager told Mamamia.

"When I found her Facebook account, I saw all this dodgy status updates from a year or two earlier where she was pretty much bullying others. One status read: '[Insert name] is a sl*t. Die.' It turned me off big time, and I threw her resume in the bin." 

Feature Image: Getty/Mamamia.

00:00 / ???