This Service Cleans Up your Social Media Profiles for Job Hunting, College Admissions, and Dating

What do admissions officers, recruiters, or potential suitors have in common? The first thing they’re going to do is Google you and dig for dirt on your social media profiles.

(Photo Credit: Maria Elena/Flickr)

In fact, data shows that over 30 percent of college admission officers visit applicants’ Facebook accounts or other personal social media pages — and almost as many discover information that negatively impacts applicants’ prospects. If you’re looking for job, your social media profiles are even more likely to be scrutinized; 39 percent of companies use social media to research candidates, and more than two in five (43 percent) hiring managers have found information that has caused them not to hire a candidate.

Of course, our social media profiles are not perfect. We all have pictures from college we’re not proud of, and may even even taken to Twitter to vent about our job. Finding those photos or that one exasperated tweet in order to purge them is not only burdensome, but darn near impossible. Instead of taking an entire weekend to delete every single post that doesn’t make you look picture-perfect, you can actually have an app scrub your social media for you. 

RepNup, which says that profiles with derogatory words, drug references, and generally too much TMI are the worst offenders when applying for jobs, school, or otherwise trying to make a good first impression, offers an app that uses an “advanced machine learning algorithms and computer vision technology to detect problematic text and pictures on your social media profiles.” After connecting the software to Facebook, you’ll receive a report within a few hours that contains an itemized list of content that could create a negative impression. Each item has a link that takes you directly to the content, where you can then delete or modify it.

Best of all, RepNup is free, so there’s no excuse not to use it to clean up your profile now — even if you’re not in the market for a job, degree, or date. After all, you never know who could be looking for you, ready to offer you a chance of a lifetime … only to change their mind after they see a questionable status update or photo album.

Tell Us What You Think

Would you use a service like RepNup to clean up your social media profiles? We want to hear from you! Leave a comment or join the discussion on Twitter.