Cleaning up your TikTok before a job search

By · maker of FixMyTok

Published: · Last revised:

Most articles on this subject try to scare you, so I will start by not doing that.

Nobody can tell you a recruiter will look at your TikTok. There is no reliable number for how often it happens in your field, in your country, at your seniority. Anyone quoting you a percentage is repeating a survey they did not read.

What the research says, and what it does not

I read the two studies this guide relies on, because what they measured is narrower than the way they usually get quoted.

Hartwell, Harrison and Campion, published in the International Journal of Selection and Assessment in 2024, ran two studies with HR professionals. In the first, 310 of them rated which social media content they find most useful for judging applicants. In the second, 151 took part in an experimental hiring simulation. Changing the social media content changed the ratings they gave. Content unrelated to the job moved ratings of work-related qualities more than job-related content did, and professional profiles were rated more favourably than personal ones.

That is a simulation, not a record of what recruiters do on a Tuesday. It still shows the mechanism: when someone looks, what they see can move the score, including the parts of a profile that have nothing to do with work.

The Brazilian side comes from Toczek, Peinado, Vianna and Meneghetti, in Revista de Ciências da Administração, also 2024. They surveyed 483 job candidates enrolled at a public university in southern Brazil, using mixed methods, and looked at the other side of the desk: how candidates use social media and how they feel about organisations checking it. Candidates were split, some agreeing with it and some not. The authors also point to the possibility that candidates create content on their personal profiles only to meet what recruiters expect. This study tells you candidates know about the practice. It does not tell you how often recruiters actually do it.

So it happens, and when it does it can move an evaluation. That is the honest version, and it is enough reason to spend an afternoon on your profile.

Look first, then hide

The first instinct is to wipe everything. It is a bad instinct. You will delete good work and still miss the one video that was the problem, because you forgot it existed.

Check for specific things:

Do not limit the list to things that look work-related. The Hartwell study found the opposite: non-job content moved the work ratings more. A joke you forgot about counts.

If your archive is too big to review by eye, that is a search problem before it is a cleanup problem. FindMyTok indexes your own published videos by what you said in them, so you can look for a company name or a phrase instead of scrolling three years of grid. It shows the snippet, the video, the date and the second of the phrase. Two limits worth knowing: it finds words, not similar ideas, and with hundreds of videos the first indexing can take a while, so start with a shorter period.

Private or delete

For a job search, Only you is almost always the right call. Here is what TikTok’s own documentation says about post visibility and deleting posts.

Only you. TikTok lets you set the audience of each post to Everyone, Friends (followers you follow back) or Only you, and change it later. For an existing post: open your profile, open the post, tap More options, then Privacy settings. If your account is private, the first option reads Followers instead of Everyone. TikTok notes that the view count reflects all views to date and does not reset when you change the setting. Nobody else can see the post, and you can reverse it the moment you sign.

Delete. TikTok says a deleted post stays in its system for up to 30 days before it is permanently deleted. During that window you find it under Profile, Menu, Settings and privacy, Activity center, Recently deleted, and restoring it brings back the comments and likes. After the 30 days it is gone, and every link to it breaks with it.

You do not need permanent. You need “not on the internet during Q4”. The full comparison is in private or delete.

There is one exception, and it is the one that matters most: Only you takes the audience away, but the video is still in your account. If the problem is the content itself, a document you filmed, personal information you said out loud, a street sign behind you, hiding is not enough. Delete it and let the 30 days run out.

On deleting and what people assume

If you want some reassurance, the USENIX Security study on deletion privacy is worth reading. It surveyed 191 people. More than 80% had deleted at least one social media post, about 35% of their deletions happened more than a week after posting, and the most common reason was that the content stopped being relevant with time. Cleaning up old content is ordinary.

The same study has a finding that cuts the other way: most participants believed that a deletion suggests the deleted content was damaging. It is a small survey about social media in general, not TikTok, and it measures what people assume, not what a recruiter does. I would not build a plan around it. I would decide video by video, based on what is in the video.

The version I would run

  1. Set a cutoff date. Pick the point before which nothing on your profile speaks for the person you are today.
  2. Hide everything before it. Only you, not delete.
  3. Review the recent material by hand. That is where nuance matters and where you will probably keep most of it.
  4. Handle reposts separately. They sit in their own tab and have their own date logic.
  5. Look at your profile as a stranger would. TikTok’s documentation says a public post can be seen by people on or off TikTok, so check it logged out, or in a private browser window, before you call it done.

That is two hours, most of them spent deciding instead of tapping, provided something does the tapping. FixMyTok does. It reads your catalogue, then lets you filter by date, visibility or a word in the caption, select the batch and confirm once. “Select all” only applies to the result of your filter, so the confirmation shows the exact size of the batch. Reposts have their own filter: older than 30 days, 6 months, 1 year, or a custom range.

If you choose to delete anything in bulk, the app asks you to type DELETE for batches of 50 or more, and offers to make them private instead on the same screen.

What can go wrong

I would rather you hear this from me.

When the contract is signed

Put it back. It is the same setting you used to hide it: set the post to Everyone again. The view count keeps what it had. That is the point of picking the reversible option, and it is why I would not delete in a hurry.