Employers Are Checking Your Facebook Page - Are You?
In a recent survey done by Careerbuilder.com, an increasing number of employers are taking a look at staff’s social networking profiles before hiring a candidate.
The survey found that 20 percent of companies admitted to checking out the profile pages of potential employees on social-networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace before deciding to hire them. Another 9 percent said that they would begin to review potential employees social-networking websites in the future.
The research also revealed that while 24 percent of employers had hired a member of the staff based on their social-networking profile, 33 percent had decided NOT to make a job offer after reviewing certain content on a profile. Use of drugs, alcohol and posting of photographs that seemed ‘inappropriate’ or ‘provocative’ were identified as the most popular reasons why employers eliminated a candidate after reviewing their social-networking profile.
Should you be scared of this?
Yes. You absolutely should. If you dragged yourself out for a Saturday night pub crawl, blacked out at some point and the next day arrives with you not remembering what happened - be worried. In today’s world - transitioning from school to a professional career can be a lot of work, but just be careful with what you do on your social-networking profiles. You don’t want to have last week’s party to be the reason you don’t get hired for that job you’ve always you wanted. These pictures work great in college, and globally acceptable among that crowd - but the professional world is a much different story. Pictures and comments your friends might leave about you could become a liability in the workplace.
First, privacy settings are your friend - use them. You can set websites like Facebook and MySpace to allow only your friends to view pictures or profile specifics. Blogs can be a huge risk too - so unless you are blogging about things like what I am talking about - keep it clean and remember, people can find what you are reading easily - so use those privacy settings. And even if you do have a job - remember that people get fired for unauthorized blogging all the time now - so BE CAREFUL!
Are you that person that Google’s themselves all the time? You should be. You have to keep up with what people might be saying about you on Yahoo! and Google. Or, if you are really curious, give Pipl.com, a “people search engine” a try. What you see here is the same thing a possible hiring manager is seeing - be careful!
And another thing to be careful of - don’t befriend people who you don’t know. You just don’t know if it will come back to bite you later. Keep your friend list to ‘friends’ and associates in both personal and professional social networks.
Case Study.
A bank intern, in 2007, was caught through Facebook lying to his boss about a family emergency, when he actually just wanted to ‘party it up’ on Halloween instead.
Kevin Colvin (pictured below) was an intern at Anglo Irish Bank’s North American arm, was busted by his manager Paul Davis after Kevin told Paul that he had to miss work because of a family emergency. His boss then turned up this photo of Colvin on his Facebook profile from a Halloween party he apparently missed work to attend, and attached it to his reply, copying the rest of the office as he did it.
Below is the short email exchange and incriminating photo.
