• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, October 16, 2014

Apparently there’s a goodly number of people out there who still haven’t received the message that stupidly putting stupid stuff on social media can cost your stupid ass a job. This week brought more confirmation that risqué social media content can damage your career prospects, in the form of a survey of hiring managers and human resources executives conducted by Jobvite.

Overall the social recruiting trend is definitely on the upswing, as 93% of recruiters currently use or plan to use social media to find likely job prospects, and 73% said they plan to invest more in social media recruiting. Unsurprisingly LinkedIn is their favorite platform, used by 94% of recruiters, followed by Facebook at 66%, Twitter at 52%, and Google+ at 21%. Meanwhile 79% have actually hired someone through LinkedIn, but just 26% have hired someone through Facebook.

Now on to that whole ruining-your-whole-life-forever thing: according to Jobvite 55% of recruiters said they have reconsidered a candidate based on their social profile, up from just 13% in 2013. And most of the time this is not a good thing: among those who have reconsidered a candidate, 61% decided to reject them after seeing something unflattering on social media. Crunching the numbers, one third of recruiters have rejected someone because of their social media presence.

The list of things that you should not put on social media is pretty much what you would expect: 83% of recruiters said they have reconsidered someone because of references to illegal drugs, 70% because of sexual posts, 66% because of spelling or grammar mistakes, 63% because of profanity, 51% because of posts involving guns, and 44% because of alcohol.

On the other hand there are apparently certain niche employment categories where these things may actually help you: 5% of recruiters said profanity was a plus, 2% liked illegal drugs, alcohol, and guns, and 1% liked sexual posts. Apparently corporate recruiters can be perverts and dirt bags too!