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‘Be Careful About What Is Out There About You’: Employers Talk Digital Presence, Workplace Etiquette with NCHS Interns-To-Be
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A director of executive recruiting at a Fortune 500 investment and insurance company told a room full of New Canaan High School seniors on Tuesday morning that she’s required to Google-search prospective employees prior to hiring them. The Hartford does formal background checks on everyone it hires, Stephanie Scoon said during a workshop for this year’s participants in the NCHS Senior Internship Program, “but believe me we do go on social media as recruiters.”
“We are required to do so, to see what that person’s online presence looks like, and it has prevented us from moving forward,” Scoon said during the workshop, held in the Wagner Room at the high school. “So please, just remember: Be very careful about what is out there about you.”
She addressed about 165 NCHS seniors participating in “SIP,” as the Senior Internship Program is known—an opt-in program overseen by Sue Carroll of the NCHS College & Career Center that sees students apply for and, in nearly all cases, find placement for the final month of their academic career here in an area business, working as an intern in lieu of attending class. David Dayya, a participant in the program this year, said he applied for SIP in order to expand in-class, “theoretical learning” on campus to “the real world.”
“Sort of apply a practical application to what we are learning in school and start finding out more about what it’s going to be like to have a job,” Dayya said during a break in the workshop. He’ll spend the final month of his NCHS career with Filling In The Blanks, a nonprofit organization launched in 2014 by two local women that helps ensure area students whose weekday meals are obtained through vouchers at a school cafeteria also have enough to eat when school’s out (weekends and summers).