Although I don't think there was necessarily anything objectionable about my response, I've deleted it because it discussed a personnel matter in my department that I'm not entirely sure was appropriate to discuss here. Thanks for understanding.

with the company told him to clean up his Facebook account and web history. My son is an atheist, and I think feels a bit put out that he has to hide this from a potential employer, as it has no bearing on how he would perform. He actually doesn't make a big deal out of his atheism and is very accepting of the beliefs of others and generally wouldn't even discuss religion unless someone else brought it up.

Employers may harbour personal prejudices against certain faiths. They also could fear that people who decide to reveal their religious beliefs — or their atheism — on resumes are more likely to discuss religion and potentially clash with co-workers.

He was thinking prejudice against atheists would be a reason to hide it, but evidently some employers worry that atheists would be either instigators of conflict or targets for others who would seek to convert.

Interesting. Thanks. I'll probably share this with him.

My oldest daughter started her own first real job last week. (Nobody said anything about religion.)

his internet presence had to do with his atheism? A lot of youngsters don't seem to realize that the net is forever--if you post a xerox of your butt, you lose control of the image in a nanosecond. And there you are, in all your glory, for future human resources officers to contemplate.

to his own personal faith, so my son is worried that it could be a problem. Religion/faith has zero to do with the job, by the way. And I guess this is where the difficulty comes in. How do we know who finds what offensive or who is unlikely to forgive that xerox of your butt? If I was hiring, I would like to think a person's faith would be of zero consequence, but if I'm truthful with myself, I might be biased against certain Christian denominations considering my own awful experience growing up in a fundamentalist sect. That wouldn't be fair but what if subconsciously I couldn't let it go?

I may be naive or idealistic, but I actually hate the idea of companies looking up their workers' online presence. I don't know that it is the employer's business what an employee does/says off the clock. I can see a criminal background check and personal references, but checking web history or Facebook just hits me as an invasion of personal space.

Facebook account and web history.

It is unbelievable to me what kids and young adults put out for public consumption.

If this potential employer is telling your son to clean it up only because of his atheism, then your son probably has a potential lawsuit.

He was basically told that the real powers that be would begin to look at his web history within a certain time frame and that he should clean up anything that might reflect poorly on him. My son knows in a round about way that some of these folks are very religious, so of course he worries his atheism might be a black mark.

But, yeah, that might be the least of his worries, as he has music he has recorded out on the internet as well as books he has self-published. Both the books and music contain bad language. Most people wouldn't consider the language "that" bad, but some folks would be offended by the f-word that he has used quite frequently in the dialogue in his stories.

He's just considering how much of his true self he's willing to hide just to secure a better wage.

I don't know his situation, but it will most likely be a good exercise for him. It's not necessarily about hiding your true self but more about learning what may or may not be appropriate for public consumption, lol.

At any rate, I certainly hope his atheism is not a black mark, although I recognize that can happen. One of the ways that I think we will move beyond the prejudice towards non-believers is for more people to "come out". Once people learn that they are just like them in so many other ways, it's hard to hold a prejudice.

When she decided it was time to move on, she put out resumes and got no nibbles. Except for nanny resumes. She worked as a nanny for a year (bosses were high-powered professionals) and sent out resumes. No nibbles, so she continued nannying, okay with it for a while longer. Then I stopped working for the church.

When she was really tired of nannying, she still got no nibbles for any other job. So she worked as a nanny for a couple more years. Then her boss--a VP for a credit card company--told her to remove the "church" job from her resume and morph it into a "non-profit organization." Her references would come from the parents of the kids she nannied, who were fairly well-off professionals. I'd be her non-profit reference and was told *not* to say what kind of organization it was unless directly asked and I couldn't duck the question.

She got a couple of interviews from the first 5 resumes she sent out, and took good job at age 50 making $65k within a month in her home town where $65k was a good salary. I don't think her employer to this day knows that her non-profit experience was with a church.

Same with me in grad school. If I said I'd worked for a church, people treated me much worse than if I said I worked for a non-profit. The other student in the program who professed strong beliefs, so much so that she spent a year as a "missionary" (her "mission" was pulling 12-hour shifts in an orphanage, caring for profoundly disabled children under age 6 ... Ukraine had a lot of them in the mid-'90s), was routinely ostracized and even mocked to the point of having to leave the room in tears. As the self-professed "tolerant" students laughed. They were 25 years old going on 4. On her resume she put down that she spent a year abroad with a "non-profit," as well.