Applicants to top American b-schools might toil away their days and nights to rack up a gallant GMAT score and write plush essays and recommendation letters. But all that may amount to nothing if Googling their name up throws up unsavoury party pictures or distasteful language on their social networking profiles, painting a completely different picture of their personality than portrayed in the application.
In a recent survey of 265 American MBA admission committees, test prep company Kaplan reported that as many as 27% admission officers admitted to having searched for applicants’ names on Google to learn more about them. 22% said that they had visited an applicant’s Facebook or other social networking webpages for the same purpose.
And of all admission officers who had researched online about applicants, 14% discovered information that ended up negatively impacting a candidate’s admission application.
With the world leading almost parallel lives on various social networking and media-sharing websites, b-schools are discovering that researching an applicant online can throw up strong supplementary knowledge such as cases of misrepresented information or imprudent public behaviour.
As Darden School of Business – Virginia university’s Assistant Director of Admissions Katherine Alford put it for PaGaLGuY, “Anything candidates post online on Facebook or Twitter is fair game.”
Asked for examples of social media information negatively impacting an application in Darden’s case, Alford said, “I’m not going to give you any examples. But I will tell you that applicants need to be aware of the image they are projecting of themselves online. If anything (on their social media profiles) is available to the public, they need to think twice about what they are projecting.”
In a response to a question on Quora, Harvard admission interviewer Allison Otis says, “If you care about your college career, one of the best things you can do is Google yourself, then pull anything off that you wouldn’t voluntarily show your parents’ friends.”
B-schools in the US that we spoke to refused to divulge exact instances of Facebook/Twitter throwing cold water on somebody’s admission chances. An admissions team member from Booth School of Business, University of Chicago who did not wish to be named however told PaGaLGuY, “Sometimes we come across an application where two and two don’t add up to four. An admissions officer might then Google the applicant’s name up to learn more about him. I am not saying that this is policy, or even that everyone involved in Booth admissions is doing it. I’m saying that sometimes when an application throws up more questions than answers, an admissions officer might try to resolve the ambiguity by looking for additional information about the applicant on the Internet as one of the many possible sources.”
Jeremy Shinewald of MBA admissions consulting company MBAMission concurs. “Logic would dictate that there is not a lot of time for busy admissions officers to check everyones profiles. Remember, 73% (in the Kaplan survey) say that they do not check up on candidates. So, I surmise that admissions officers may try to find the story behind those making incredible claims about their success or similar unusual claims. It is worth noting that these 27% of admissions officers do not say that they make Googling a standard policy. They may have checked in only a few extreme situations.”
None of the schools have been known to disclose to applicants that they would be looked up online, in case they were. Nor is Google a perfect tool that guarantees comprehensive access to all online published information about a person — it can throw up false positives and false negatives too.
But is it fair of b-schools to use applicants’ social media information as a factor during admissions?
Linda Abraham, who runs the admission essay consultancy service Accepted.com points out that employers have been researching job applicants online during background checks long before colleges did. “The schools are just following the lead set by business. And they want their graduates to be employable. My personal opinion is that it is legitimate for a school to go to public sources to learn about their applicants,” she remarks.
Whether this is a violation of an applicant’s privacy is debatable. Most popular social networking websites allow full control to its users for deciding what should be public and what should be enclosed in a private wall. Therefore whatever hasn’t been made private by applicants is there for the entire world to view, as it is for b-school admissions officers. ‘Fair game’, as Alford put it.
Darden’s dean Robert F Bruner in fact insists that he does not want people with a sense of unwise public and social behaviour to enter his school, and an applicant’s public profiles on social networking sites mirror his real life public behaviour.
“We are looking for people who are socially aware and understand the impact of what they say to others. We want people who are emotionally intelligent, demonstrate sensitivity, character and quality in restraint in their public and social behaviour. The Internet is however absolutely awash with the kind of qualities we are not looking for in the candidate. If an applicant has such undesirable qualities, we would like to find out,” he explains.
On the other hand, there could be incorrect or embarrassing information about applicants posted without their permission by third-parties, which may lead an admissions team to make incorrect judgments about the applicants.
Shinewald expands this predicament, “It creates an uneven playing field, where someone with a common name can get lost in the reeds and someone with a distinct name suddenly faces a Google disadvantage. At a minimum, an admissions officer should disclose that they are performing a background check of this sort.”
The fundamental question of course, still remains — over time, applicants will learn to be smarter and hide skeletons (if any) behind privacy settings on Facebook and Twitter away from the view of admission officers and put forth an illusion of virtuous personality. Would the rest — who are caught on the wrong side during an admissions committee Google search — pay for having those skeletons or not being shrewd enough to stack them way?
As of today, Internet research of applicants is limited to a minority pocket of b-schools But if a rising number of admission committees start seeking the Internet’s aid in researching their applicants, sooner or later they would have to address these concerns and formulate fair and foolproof methods of harnessing the Internet for background checks.
For now, applicants to international b-schools might want to pay heed to Shinewald’s advice, “I advise candidates to clean-up whatever they can (on their social media profiles) long before they start applying. I definitely suggest that candidates use the strictest security settings on their Facebook accounts and mind their tweets. It is highly recommended that candidates avoid posting any photos of themselves online in the lead-up to an application no matter what they may be doing. To the extent that candidates have something negative that they are aware of, they should seek to have it taken offline or potentially even seek to have other information posted online, so that the unwanted information gets bumped down in organic search.”
Linda Abraham counsels, “Remove anything that is embarrassing and that you have the ability to remove. Clean up your online presence. Put the best side of you online so that the positive and the recent essentially covers up the stuff youd rather others not see. If there are things online that you cant remove and that you are embarrassed about or would not like a school or future employer to know about, create a more positive online presence for yourself. Write a blog. Set up a clean YouTube channel with videos devoted to your hobby or favorite cause. Ask friends to link to the new material. Google will display first pages and items that are linked to more.”