Under Cleavage Is Not Appreciated by Employers

Just when you think you’ve seen it all, you’re sent an email by Ami alerting you to a candidate who uses her MySpace blog to, ahem, expose not only her employment qualifications but also her under cleavage.

After reviewing this Virtual Handshakee blog entry, I have to agree with the blog author that it is likely that this is not some deliberate college girls gone crazy nude photo meets the job market. Rather, Kristine, the college girl whose almost naked photo of her torso and breasts is alongside her employment qualifications blog entry, likely posted the blog entry at one time and the photo at another time. MySpace lays out the blog entries alongside the photo so to the uninitiated viewer the two appear to have been posted together and therefore directly related to each other.
Whether accidental or deliberate, this is the type of stuff that drives employers crazy and it should. Let’s assume that Kristine’s employment-related qualifications are superb and you are interested in hiring her but then you see that photo. What do you do now? To most people, there’s nothing pornographic or even obscene about the photo. It is titillating at best. But see a photo of a potential candidate showing off her under cleavage is not something that a typical hiring manager or human resource professional wants to see as it can open up the employer to allegations of sexual discrimination.
College students and the entire population have to be more careful about the information they post on-line. Remember, posting information to MySpace, Facebook, or any other social networking or other web site is like getting a tattoo.