Texas Woman Interviews For Job; Company Posts Pic Of Her In Bikini On Instagram To Shame Her
Instead of a job, she got a lecture from the company she applied to.
Instagram A young woman applied for a job as a marketing coordinator at a Texas firm. Instead of a job offer, she got a lecture about one of the photos on her personal Instagram account.
Emily Clow says she applied for a job with Kickass Masterminds in Austin and was preparing for an interview with them by checking out their social media feeds.
To her surprise, she found a photo of herself in the Instagram stories. Not only that, the photo had been captioned with comments from the company saying “[T]his is not doing you any favors in finding a professional job.”
The company looked at her personal Instagram account and took a photo of her in a swimsuit without her permission. Then they shared the photo with a caption shaming Clow for having it on her social media while applying for jobs.
They didn't tag her so she didn't even know that they had a problem with the photo — they were simply using her image to lecture job candidates.
Clow asked the company to remove the picture and they blocked her from contacting them.
Who is Emily Clow? Read on for the bizarre details of this story.
1. Answering a job posting
Emily Clow responded to a posting for a Marketing Coordinator position at Kickass Masterminds.
According to the job post on LinkedIn, the Austin firm “curates and facilitates Mastermind Groups for small business owners, white-label partners, and corporations. All we do is mastermind groups and we’re damn good at it.”
Clow sent them a resume and, she told NBC News, they got back to her to set up an interview. They also asked her to follow them on Instagram. She went ahead and did so, thinking it was a good networking move.
2. Social media shaming
Evidently, once the company had Clow's social media handle, the person doing the hiring at Kickass Masterminds perused her personal Instagram feed and discovered a photo of her wearing a bathing suit and standing in a swimming pool.
The company screen-captured the photo and shared it on their on Insta stories feed, with the caption “PSA (because I know some of you applicants are looking at this) do not share your social media with a potential employer if this is the kind of content on it. I am looking for a professional marketer — not a bikini model.”
In a second image of the same screenshot, another caption read: "Go on with your bad self and do whatever in private. But this is not doing you any favors in finding a professional job.”
Emily had not given them permission to use her photo and was shocked and upset to see it being used this way.
3. What is Kickass Masterminds?
At the moment, the company has gone dark online, taking down its website and social media feeds so there isn’t much information about who they are or what they do.
According to the job posting, which is still on LinkedIn, the company was founded by a woman named Sara Christensen.
“Kickass is lead by Sara Christensen who has started and owned five businesses over the past 25 years. Her largest business was doing $10 million in revenue per year and employed 75 people when she sold it,” the listing says.
The listing also claims that the company helps companies facilitate “mastermind groups,“ which are peer-to-peer mentoring groups to help businesses solve problems and help individuals develop relationships and skills.
The job listing emphasized that the company was a start-up and specifically advertised for a recent college graduate, as opposed to a more experienced candidate.
4. They objectified me
Clow was not pleased to see her image used that way, despite the company cropping her face out of the photo before they shared it. She reached out to Kickass Masterminds to ask them to remove the picture but they never responded. She asked several times but, eventually, they blocked her from contacting them, NBC reports.
In frustration, Clow took to Twitter, saying, “I was objectified earlier today by a company because of a picture of me in a bikini. They claimed it made me an 'unprofessional.' they screenshot the photo, posted it on their Insta story and called me out. i am still baffled that the company handled it in such a manner.”
She tagged the company’s Twitter account in the post and scared a screenshot of Kickass Mastermind’s post about her.
Clow called out Kickass Masterminds for shaming her online.
5. Massive online backlash
The response to the incident was immediate and no one was coming to the defense of Kickass Masterminds.
Page Six reports that a Twitter account called @SheRatesDogs, which shames people’s exes, shared Clow’s story and that tweet has been liked over 47,000 times. The general sentiment is that the picture wasn’t anything scandalous — Clow was standing in a swimming pool when it was taken, it wasn’t a boudoir-type photo — and the company needs to chill about what people put on their own social media feeds.
Moreover, no one thinks it’s a good business practice to give job candidates snotty lectures in public.
Clow has tons of support online.
6. Trying to be transparent
Clow told NBC that she was going public with the incident as a lesson to potential employers that shaming job candidates on social media is unacceptable. She says that many people have shared similar experiences with her and "To have all these people be so supportive and share their stories is amazing.”
NBC tried to contact Christensen to discuss the matter but she did not return their messages.
Rebekah Kuschmider has been writing about celebrities, pop culture, entertainment, and politics since 2010. Her work has been seen at Ravishly, Babble, Scary Mommy, The Mid, Redbook online, and The Broad Side. She is the creator of the blog Stay at Home Pundit and she is a cohost of the weekly podcast The More Perfect Union.