[EricH]

Personal life can often affect professional life, and vice versa. The habits you form in your personal life may or may not filter into your professional life. Employers realize this.

Let us say, for the sake of example, that I had a picture on some other website of myself and some high-school friends having a beer, and the person who was going to be employing me over the summer had access to that page (through legal means, of course--friend's father, let's say, is the employer, or privacy settings are at no privacy). What does that picture say about my likely choices? What does it say about the kind of friends I hang out with?

One picture might not do much. But let's also say that I have several pictures of that sort, taken on different days, mingled in with a few pictures of a family vacation or similar things. What pattern do you see developing if you're an employer?

If I was an employer looking at that type of thing, I'd see someone who might be having serious lapses in judgment; someone who might easily be late (hangovers); someone who doesn't follow the law (which may then come back to bite me, as you never know if they might cause something to disappear). That's what I'd see. The first two might not be a problem; the third one might be enough for me not to hire them at all.

(Note: I have no pictures of that sort that I know about, let alone having them online. The above is simply an example of what could happen.)