DISPARAGING COMMENTS ON SOCIAL MEDIA CAN GET YOU DINGED AT DARDEN
But sometimes it’s intel from current students that sends her team to Twitter or someone’s blog, she says. In one instance, it was something an applicant said not about Darden students or the school but about New Yorkers that backfired. “Actually, what they wrote about their visit to Darden was fine, but in a blog post about visiting Yale they said all these disparaging things about New Yorkers,” she remembers. “If someone is going to publicly disparage other people, that’s just not the kind of person we want at Darden.”
“Typically, when it’s something like that, we hear about it from current students,” Neher says. Although she does have Google alerts set on both her own name and Darden, she confesses. “If you have something weird out there, it will most likely come to my attention.”
At Emory’s Goizueta Business School, members of the Admissions Committee very regularly go to LinkedIn or Facebook to check out candidates, says Associate Dean of MBA Admissions Julie Barefoot. “We have such a personalized admissions process that we very likely may have met them on the road, and often we’re just trying to remember who they were,” she explains. So they’ll pull up a profile and say, “Oh, right, that’s who that is—I had a really positive interaction with her.”
“I don’t as a matter of course Google someone,” Barefoot says. “I am not saying I won’t, and I won’t say I haven’t, but I will say it’s rare,” she says. “But if there is anything on the application that makes me nervous, I absolutely will.”
Barefoot is much more likely to Google the company an applicant works for if she’s not familiar with it. “If someone is a financial analyst at the Home Depot, we know what that job is, the level of responsibility, what might be a good next step for them,” she says. But if it’s an unfamiliar company, her team will often try to learn more. “Sometimes we find, ‘Wow, this is actually a really good company and a really significant job,’” she says. But other times, Googling reveals that the company doesn’t really have a website or that the applicant’s role is not very significant. “Sometimes, a candidate will say they want to work at McKinsey and you go and look at what they are doing now and you say ‘This is simply not going to happen.’”
Often the first reader of the application will do this due diligence as part of Emory’s review process, Barefoot notes, “but I generally like to do my own.”
As at Darden, the Emory team will definitely turn to social media if directed there by the applicant. “If a person says they started a small business, we absolutely Google that,” Barefoot says. But in some instances they’ll also head to LinkedIn to double check information they may have listed in their resume. “Fortunately, we haven’t seen very much misrepresentation,” she says. “I know it does happen, but I haven’t seen it a lot where people say they have on job on LinkedIn and things look different on the resume they submit as part of their application. “But we would be very interested in discovering if that were the case.”
