Nothing ever “dies” online. Once it’s out there, people will be able to access it forever; no matter how hard you try to remove it, there will always be some cached form living in obscurity online. Recently, an employer learned this firsthand, as a job fair posting from 2015 came back to life and attracted 300 people to the company.
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The Wichita Eagle (The Eagle) is reporting that Spirit AeroSystems (Spirit) had to regretfully tell 300 people that the job fair they were lined up for already happened—2 years prior. In 2015, The Wichita Eagle published a story about a job fair that Spirit was holding. The job fair turned out to be great—over 2,000 people showed up!
“We had people wrapped around our employment building,” Spirit Spokesman Jarrod Bartlett, told The Eagle. “We had so many people that day that we couldn’t even get everyone through the process.” Flash forward to 2017, and Spirit employees are scratching their heads wondering how this information came about.
Apparently, it all started when someone shared the 2015 article on his or her Facebook page—of course, this person probably didn’t check the date of the article before sharing it to his or her followers. The Eagle reports that the 2015 article had been getting lots of traffic over the past few weeks, with people clicking on it almost 30,000 times. The Eagle tried to stop the article’s popularity by running an article saying there was no job fair, but clearly, the damage had already been done.
Spirit also tried telling people that there was no job fair, but as Bartlett told The Eagle, “You sort of fight social media with social media.” And it was too late, because 300 people did not get the message and showed up for the job fair anyway.
Spirit was happy to remind attendees that the company is always hiring, just not that day—and not that large of a crowd. “A company of our size, we’re almost always looking for someone just because of normal attrition,” Bartlett says. “It is encouraging and it is refreshing to know that people want to work at Spirit AeroSystems so much so that they’re showing up for a job fair that wasn’t even planned.”
While there isn’t really a lesson here for employers, there is something to be learned from this that everyone should know: Make sure you check dates before sharing articles online, it’ll save the confusion later on!
 Melissa Blazejak is a Senior Web Content Editor at BLR. She has written articles for HR.BLR.com and the HR Daily Advisor websites and is responsible for the day-to-day management of HR.BLR.com and HRLaws.com. She has been at BLR since 2014. She graduated with a BA of Science, specializing in Communication, from Eastern Connecticut State University in 2008. Most recently, she graduated in 2014 with a MS of Educational Technology. |