Are we perpetrating fake news about ourselves?

It is an interesting paradox of accessibility versus truth. We all have a chance to have our say on everything whether we are informed, speaking from personal experience or basing our judgments on hearsay and anecdotal evidence.

The media waves are clogged with voices speaking their opinions, and this can be both a great and a terrible thing.

However, whichever way you look at it, fake news – real fake news, not the Donald Trump variety defined by negative press – is damaging. The truth invariably comes out, albeit often after the damage has been done.

Our reputations are everything in this day and age, where the internet (ironically) carves our digital activities in stone.

And how we conduct ourselves in this space can have significant repercussions on our future life choices, including our career options.

In the last year, we have seen individuals express their political opinions in the public forum via social media on topics such as marriage equality, and then subsequently find themselves being fired.

We’ve seen people tweet text message conversations with their boss on Twitter asking for advice on how to respond, only for it go viral and ultimately, get fired over it. We’ve seen people complain about having to go to work and how much they hate their job on social media, only to turn up to work on Monday to find that yep, they’ve been fired.

Sensing a pattern here? How we represent ourselves, our truth, online, has serious repercussions in our real lives.

Maintaining a positive public profile in the digital sphere is not just the business of the happily employed.

It is vital for those of us looking for work that we maintain mindfulness in all of our public interactions including our online conversations.

Some of you may wonder at the honesty of this – are we in fact perpetrating our own fake news about ourselves by biting our tongue when we would ordinarily be loud and proud?

Are we encouraging each other to smother our biases and cover up our opinions for fear of offending someone and perhaps losing out on a job because of the assumed resulting prejudice? Is this ethical?

Applying for jobs can be like running the gauntlet, where you don’t know where the next disembodied punching glove will extend from to knock us out. It is very competitive, it is tight and – in a world so tightly bound in political correctness – it can feel wrong to seek to step into your own authenticity and find the confidence to loudly be yourself.

Our society seems to encourage genericising ourselves while still trying to find a way to stand out from the crowd “for the right reasons.” 

Yet, by hiding who we truly are and what we really think, by aligning ourselves to company values and mission statements that really mean nothing to us, all we are doing is creating an image that we assume a hirer wants to see, authenticity be damned.

It’s often deemed “too risky” to just be ourselves, and we find ourselves kicking our light under the proverbial bushel with our shiny business shoe as we straighten our suits and dust off imaginary flecks of fluff from our sleeves.

The best job applications are a true reflection of the candidate.

It’s not about fluffing yourself up and copying the company values into your profile statement in your resume.

It’s about reflecting on yourself and understanding how (and if) you align with the company in the first place, identifying your points of intersection and selling your points of difference as a means of bringing a fresh perspective.

Every career counsellor on the planet will recite “don’t lie on your resume”, and they are correct.

However, a good career counsellor will tell you to demonstrate the value that you bring through the unique story that you represent, the lessons that you’ve learned and the new ideas that you have developed.

Don’t be afraid to be yourself in your job applications – no one wants to hire a robot, parroting the company website.

In the famous words of William Shakespeare, “to thine own self, be true”.