The Day I Discovered A Recruitment Dominatrix [True story]

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I am going to share with you true story from a social recruiting workshop I did, that will undoubtedly make you smile, but also has potentially serious consequences for your employees. For reasons you will soon understand there will be no names mentioned here.

As part of my consulting assignments with companies, I often run workshops with their recruiting and HR teams on many aspects of social media recruiting. As part of the workshops I like to inject some good natured fun into the sessions - and fortunately social media provides me with plenty of opportunities to do that. Just to be clear - I don’t go deep digging for this, I just use some basic Google searches, as this would replicate the simple search candidates or clients could well do prior to an interview. (There is a reason I do it!)

Before I start with the story, I am hoping you are already starting to understand the message in this post. In recruitment and HR, it is doubly worth making sure whatever social media profiles you think are locked down for privacy, are indeed that - locked down thoroughly! Many candidates regularly Google people before talking/meeting/interviewing with HR, recruiters and line managers, so maybe it is worth checking what ALL your social media profiles looks like- not just LinkedIn. Remember, all the social media networks - LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest etc - are well indexed and highly ranked my Google, Yahoo etc in their search results. So just because you don’t use a particular social network for work, doesn’t mean a prospective candidate or client won’t find it and see the contents! This is exactly what happened in my true story.

So, here is how I discovered a recruitment dominatrix.

Let me just set the scene. I was running a workshop for a recruitment company, on social media candidate sourcing. In the room were 20 consultants, all at various stages of using social media for recruiting. As always when I start, we go around the room to ascertain which social networks people use outside work, as it helps me determine their potential for social media sourcing. There were a few of them that had five or six accounts, but the majority used just two or three - all of them using Facebook. So I brought up the subject of privacy and we had a laugh about the usual drunken pictures, dodgy holiday snaps and basic inappropriate content shared with their friends. I then asked a simple question to the group:

“I trust then that you all have Facebook and your other social media sites set to the privacy settings you want, and that you have nothing that you wouldn’t want your granny to see then?”

Of course, I got the usual responses when you ask this question -  ‘I think so’, ‘of course’, ‘yes’, ‘no one ever looks at my Facebook anyway’, ‘only my friends can see my pictures’ - as well as the few people who quickly get their iPhones out to check their own settings. But this time I got something different.

A consultant who I shall call Jane (obviously not her real name) very proudly announced that she has got all her social media sites locked down, and I wouldn’t find any details on her and her private life!

The challenge had been set.

I first asked  her if it was OK for me to do some simple searches based on her name, and she was very happy for me to do so. Her colleagues embraced the fun aspect of this and waited for me to find something. They did not expect what was coming next!

The irony of this story is  that I didn’t even do a complex search. I just did a Google search for her name. On the top of the second page of Google I found it - her Instagram account. Only it wasn’t her name on the @username, it was (again not her real name before you search for it) @SexyDom-in-atrix. Have you ever had that moment happen to you when you are literally speechless? Well for 2-3 seconds the room fell silent - and my immediate reaction to myself was, “sh*t, what do I do next?”

To be fair to Jane, she was the first to speak (quickly followed by ‘compliments’ and laughing in the room). She wasn’t shocked or embarrassed, she cooly asked me why it showed up in a search when she thought it was private.  [I just need to mention that there was no nudity or anything like that in the pictures, they were all her range of outfits and client poses only. ]
The answer was a simple one, and a simple mistake to make .

When she set the Instagram account up she used her own name but she called the account @SexyDom-in-atrix thinking that her name wouldn’t be used. She never thought to check (strangely). Google returned her name as the owner of the Instagram account as well as her @username in the search.
To Jane’s credit, she didn’t shy away from it and took the took the banter very well from her colleagues (who had no idea of her life outside work), for the rest of the workshop, and subsequent weeks. Obviously she made changes to her account, and then made sure on the rest of her accounts. She contacted me a few weeks later to actually thank me! It was getting more stressful for her trying to keep it a secret, and in a strange way her mistake (and me finding it) actually helped her relax more at work. She is happy for me to share this story, even though she is kept anonymous. As far as I know she is still there and billing well 🙂

That was one social media recruitment workshop I will never forget.