Wash your Facebook before you Apply for that Job

FTVLive talks to scores of News Managers each and everyday.

We talk about everything from tips they throw our way to who we might know that would be a good hire.

We have never done a formal poll, but were fairly certain that at least 7 out of 10 News Directors, check a potential hire's social media accounts before they offer the person the job.

So, if you have some questionable posts on Facebook, you might want to get rid of them before you send off that resume.

Lucky for you, there is an easy way to do that.

The blog LifeHacker writes that if the prospect of going back over years of Facebook posts to determine whether some of them should be hidden or photos untagged is daunting, webapp FaceWash can help. The service scans your posts, timeline, and tagged photos to make sure nothing incriminating is going on, and warns you if it finds anything.

The app requires access to your basic profile information, and while it asks for permission to post on your behalf (make sure to set those posts to be viewable by "only me") when I tested the service it didn't post anything. The scanning process only takes a few minutes, more or less depending on how many public Facebook posts and tagged photos you have. When it's done, you'll see each category—photos you're tagged in, photos you've posted, status updates, and so on—and whether or not they're clean.

While the service uses its own metric to determine what's clean and what isn't, you can also use FaceWash to search your profile for any keywords that you might not want to appear. For example, if you're interviewing with a company and want to make sure any Facebook posts about that company are well hidden or deleted, you can search for the company's name and it'll show you any applicable results. You can read more abouthow the service works here.

FaceWash is fast and free, and when you're done you can always revoke its permissions so it's not hanging around. With Facebook's new Graph Search, now's a good time to clean things up.