The moment 24-year-old Emily Clow saw the opening of a marketing position in an Austin-based firm, she knew she was well-suited for the job and could actually use her social media and sales experience.
Emily submitted the application for the job but what uncovered next was a matter of total surprise for her.
Turned out, Emily’s potential employer was using her personal photos from Instagram to decide if she was a suitable fit for their company.
Just after Emily was asked to fill in another application, the employer, Kicka** Masterminds, posted on their story a photo of Emily in Bikini that they got from her Instagram.
The photo suggested people not to “share your social media accounts with a potential employer if this is the kind of content on it.”
“I am looking for a professional marketer – not a bikini model,” Kicka** Masterminds captioned the photo.
“Go on with your bad self and do whatever in private. But this is not doing you any favors finding a professional job,” they added.
Following the incident, Emily took to Twitter on Tuesday to tell how she felt objectified about the company using her pictures as a bad example.
The tweet soon went viral and she’s been receiving positive comments from people, with some even offering to help her find another job.
“The support is absolutely phenomenal,” Emily told BuzzFeed News.
Emily said she was stunned to see her photo being posted for such a matter and she didn’t even have an idea about how to react to it.
“I felt like I was being objectified,” Emily said.
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.
ADVERTISEMENT — Emily Clow (@emilyeclow) October 1, 2019
“She basically said, ‘Hey, you can’t post anything outside of work of you wearing a bikini,’ which most girls wear at pools. Like, I don’t think anyone wears sweatpants to the pool or anything.”
Emily emailed the company and tried to contact them through Instagram to take the picture down, only to get blocked on their social media accounts.
Following the social media backlash, the CEO and founder of Kicka** Masterminds, Sara Christensen, apologized to Emily in a Medium post, saying that she made “an error in judgment” while sharing the story.
“To anyone watching: I am a great case study in what NOT to do,” Christensen wrote.
“I have absolutely learned a lesson in this event, and while I’m not ready to publicly address it in detail, I will let you know if or when that changes.”
The company has set its Instagram account to private status and their Facebook pages and websites have been down ever since.
“I think them going dark is just interesting in itself because I think they realize they made a mistake,” Emily said.
According to the LinkedIn page of the company, which is also down for now, the company worked for “rebellious business owners” who “yearn for freedom and are ballsy enough to chase after it” and “want other like-minded people to have their back when shit gets tough.”
“I really didn’t think that an employer that obviously showed interest in me … would use me as an example of what not to do when applying for jobs and call me unprofessional,” Emily said.
She said she shared the incident on social media to shed light on it.
“I thought this was a situation that I feel like a lot of women deal with on a daily basis when they’re they’re job hunting,” she added.
“I figured that, ‘Hey, I might as well talk about this,’ because if I talk about it I know someone else is going through this and we can start a conversation and see if there’s a way to fix the issue.”
Replaced!