“You are what you post” describes anyone’s online persona, and the Internet often doesn’t have a delete key. This column, like any column in a college newspaper, is an exercise in gambling when it comes to the next job.

If hiring managers aren’t googling their next employees, they should be — it’s important to their bottom line.

In 2006, the majority of executive recruiters used search engines to screen job candidates, according to an ExecutNet survey. That’s old news: nowadays, almost 80 percent of companies surveyed by Jobvite, a recruiting tech company, said they use social networking or social media to support recruitment efforts.

The information you can glean from social networks can be much more extensive than Google. A September Boston Globe article reported that two Massachusetts Institute of Technology students developed a software program dubbed “Gaydar” that could predict whether a person was gay based on an analysis of the gender and orientation of his or her Facebook friends.

Researchers at the University of Maryland, College Park, looked at four social networks and found they could make working predictions about things like where Flickr users live.

A University of Texas at Dallas professor developed models to predict Facebook users’ political affiliations, based on friendship links and profile details.

Are employers less likely to hire based on something like political affiliation or music tastes? Who can tell, but it seems less is more for one’s online presence. Twitter is particularly intimidating: A user might have hundreds of tweets, and a small number are bound to say something racy.

It seems an established trend for companies to have a grasp of their potential applicants’ personal details and lives well before bringing them on board. Aside from social networking sites, blogs, postings and any Web memberships are easy to track online.

So what will it be? In the future, the norm could probably be survival of the fittest or drastically looser expectations for employees. If it comes down to professional Darwinism, being successful in the white-collar labor force will require squeaky-clean lifestyle choices or a bulletproof cover-up of that lifestyle. Since a substantial percentage of the U.S. population drinks, has experimented with illegal substances and espouses political views (potentially at odds with their boss), this would be a big endorsement of micro-level public relations tactics.

If expectations are loosened, employers may come to expect the people they hire to engage in professionally embarrassing behaviors, or might be at odds with socially conservative business partners or clients. For politics, we might expect recent trends, like the last three American presidents using illegal drugs, to become mainstream.

Is transparency a good thing? Maybe — the market will decide if it hasn’t already. For now, check your privacy settings.

Reach Matt at matt.culbertson@asu.edu.