Cisco Fatty: How to Lose a Job in 140 Characters or Less

Twitter Job Search

Be careful what you tweet. Be careful about everything you do on the Web. Can we say it loud enough? Apparently not.

eWEEK’s Careers blogger Don Sears brings us the potentially sad tale of Connor Riley, a.k.a.  “Cisco Fatty,” a candidate for a job at Cisco Systems who made the misstep of telling the world via Twitter that she was holding her nose as she considered the job offer.

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.

We can’t say it loud enough, everything you say and do on the Web isn’t just in public, it’s documented for the record books and distributed to worldwide for all to see. Even on Twitter, where users have a mere 140 characters to fit their foot in their mouth, the Web remains a place for discretion.

In the case of “theconnor,” her missive was seen by a Cisco manager who replied:

timmylevad: @theconnor 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.

Riley, who identified herself in a blog post, said she believed she was sharing the angst of the decision with a small circle of friends on her Twitter page.  But she had not established any privacy settings on her account making her post the equivalent of buying a billboard outside the hiring manager office window.

We don’t know yet what became of the fatty salary she was offered, but the event should be in the textbooks of web etiquette.

For a refresher course, start with our online worksheet, “Checklist: Clean Up Your Web Trail.”
Additional coverage of Web etiquette on the job search:

• Social Netiquette: Mind Your Manners
• Can You Facebook Your Way to a New Job?
• Social Networking: Painless and Powerful
• Top 10 Ways to Use Social Media to Give Back to Your Network

For more on Cisco Fatty, follow the saga on Twitter, where the scene of the crime has attracted a crowd.

(Twitter Job Search by Mykl Roventine, CC2.0)

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