One third of employers turn down job candidates after viewing their Facebook profiles

by Yuliya Talmazan | September 15, 2008 at 02:37 pm
568 views | 4 Recommendations | 6 comments

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Tell me who your Facebook friends are, and I will tell you who you are. Employers are actively checking personal profiles of prospective employees on Facebook. Now, this is not news in itself. It has been known for a long time that some employers do it. What surprised me is that more than 20% of them rely on Facebook profiles to hire workers and that number is growing. What is more, one third of employers decide NOT to hire employees after reviewing the content of their Facebook profile. The survey's results include other social networks as well.

CareerBuilder carried out a survey and found out that 22 percent of 3,169 hiring managers are screening social networking sites to see if their prospective employees are drinking too much, doing drugs, trashing former employers, or letting out trade secrets on their profiles.

    A further 9 percent said they planned to start reviewing potential employees' social networking pages in the future.

    The survey result also revealed that while 24 percent of employers had hired a member of staff based on their social-networking profile, 33 percent had also decided not to make a job offer after reviewing the content on a profile.

    The employers were mostly interested in the candidate's backgrounds supporting their qualifications for the job.

    Use of drugs or drinking and the posting of photographs deemed "inappropriate" or "provocative" were identified as the most popular reasons causing employers to kick the candidates out of the hiring process.

    The job hunters are advised to either regularly edit their social-networking pages to ensure there is no negative content available or make them "private" to avoid would-be employers snooping at their personal life.



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master_jim2008
master_jim2008
flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 14:45 on September 15th, 2008

yuls.source, I like this story. It's good stuff.

there ought to be a law, but hey, Bush wouldn't let something like an invasion of privacy become against the law would he?

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Yuliya Talmazan

No,  I doubt he would. Yet, this scares me. It is like judging book by its cover.

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JeffHuang

I dont get how this works. So the employer adds you on facebook to access your profile/pics? I thought you cant look at a person's information/pics unless your friends.

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Yuliya Talmazan

I thought so too. I know medical school applicants who delete their facebook profiles to make sure admission committee does not have access to their personal information. So, somehow the information is obtainable.




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dunkelberg

Lord knows what they'd make of this place



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SEOetc

It's a real shame that personal lives can dictate those decisions... Orwell was VERY ambitious!!! We're turning into a society of total surveillance and control.....

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