Tweet Your Way to Losing a Job Offer

Only a few weeks after a teenager lost a job because of a Facebook update saying her job was boring, a person with "foot in the mouth" disease may have tweeted his way out of a job offer. His update on Twitter:

Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.

A fat paycheck, but work he hates and a rotten commute, eh? He may not get a chance to decide if he wants the offer, as Tim Levad at Cisco tweeted back:

Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.

Oops. It just goes to show you that you need to be careful what you publicly broadcast on Twitter or Facebook (or MySpace, or ...).

theconnor has since protected his status updates, but it's waaaaaay too late. Someone even spent the time and effort to create a site mocking him, CiscoFatty.com.

However, theconnor has put up a blog of his own, at which the first post addresses this whole issue. His post sounds like he may have turned down the Cisco job (his first paragraph says he turned down some job) before even sending that tweet, and that the tweet was meant for his followers, no one else.

Of course, that doesn't excuse the flippancy, but as he says:

Should Tim Levad have backed off? Not necessarily; it was crass of me to say what I did and I take full responsibility for the stupidity of my action. Instead of blaming him, let me use him to illustrate what I have learned: Tim Levad and @timmylevad are two different people. @timmylevad is defined entirely by the number of people listening to it. But whatever @timmylevad says is backed up by the subtle persuasive knowledge that somewhere back there, Tim Levad the person is pulling the strings.

Twitter isn't something we use. Facebook on the other hand, we do. Which leads to other questions. A bigwig at a new company we work for sends us an invite. We really don't want him watching my updates. But if we don't accept we may upset him. So we accepted and limited his access to our status updates.

It's something to worry about in these days of the Web. Watch what you post, or you may be unemployed, or worse.