I had the pleasure of speaking to about 75 students and staff at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, New York earlier this week. I was invited by the school to talk with the students about how employers are using the web to both include and exclude them from the hiring process. What an impressive group of students.

During the hour long and very interactive discussion we talked how many Gen Y’ers think nothing of posting photos and other information to sites such as Facebook and MySpace under the mistaken impression that employers either can’t see it or won’t care about it. I showed some examples of students using the web to enhance their employment opportunities and others who are killing their chances because of what they’ve posted on-line. We also talked about what candidates can do to remove harmful information that they’ve posted or which has been posted by others and to bury information that can’t be removed.

I was very impressed with the students. In addition to be attentive and focused, they frequently asked great questions so we had much more of a dialogue than a presentation. That made it more interesting and educational for them and a lot more fun for me. Several of the students approached me afterwards to discuss their situations.

One takeaway that I need to chew on for a while: of the 75 or so attendees, only one indicated that he had heard of LinkedIn and that was because his boss had insisted that he sign-up. He uses it and understands its phenomenal potential for job seekers so hats off to him, but what about the others? Why are the others not using LinkedIn? Is it a generational gap? I can’t imagine that the answer is that they feel that it won’t help them because apparently only one had heard of it. If you don’t know about a tool, you can’t know whether it is going to help you or not. Perhaps the real question here is why haven’t these students even heard of LinkedIn and are they representative of students at other colleges across the country?

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