Employers screen applicants with Facebook
David Linhardt | January 27, 2006 10:05 AM | Link
Make sure to add “Change Facebook profile” to your graduation to-do list—future employers may be checking your resume alongside your Facebook.com profile and using the information they find to reject you for employment.
Campus police at George Washington University have used Facebook to snoop for parties where underage drinking might be happening. Parents use Facebook to check up on sons and daughters. Now employers and even the career centers at the University of Kansas use Facebook to evaluate students who are being considered for KU jobs.
“We hire students to work in our office and professional staff and we do look at their Facebook entries,” said Mary Andrade Carlson, assistant director of University Career Center. “It gives us better insight to how they truly present themselves.”
Carlson uses Facebook regularly to evaluate hiring prospects for a particular job or even just to find contacts in a particular field to invite to sit at alumni panel presentations.
Facebook—an online networking site for college students—is the brainchild of Harvard students who wanted to transpose traditional yearbooks online.
Facebook spokesman Chris Hughes said he was not aware of any employer using Facebook to assess potential workers.
Jolene Byer, assistant director of the Business Career Services Center at the School of Business said that an employer at a recent conference mentioned using Facebook to screen candidates for a job.
“One person had posted a suggestive picture, and another talked about being drunk all the time,” Byer said. “One had a fairly vanilla profile, and that person got it.”
Byer says Facebook is like a big ad in a newspaper—anyone can see it. While Facebook does allow anyone to register as a user, they must have email addresses ending in .edu to be accepted. Employers often access student profiles because one of their employees or interns is a member of Facebook.
“There’s an illusion of privacy, but the information is out there,” Byer said. “It can help you or hurt you at some point.”
Byer said the job of a manager is to make sure an employee fits with his company—so if he sees on Facebook that all a candidate ever does is party and post suggestive photos online, then a manager will likely see that person as a future problem.
After the Kansas Association of Colleges and Employers conference last November, Byer explored KU student profiles on Facebook.
“I found things that could get people fired,” Byer said. “It was something I had never thought of before this conference.”
Carlson and Byer both warned against mentioning the company you work for on Facebook.
“We recently had an employer contact a career services office on campus because a student had mentioned negative information about their company on a Facebook profile,” Andrade Carlson said.
Byer says to use common sense. Can something posted online come back to haunt you? A boss can ask an employee or intern to look you up on Facebook and find anything you’ve written there. The career centers at KU are planning to better inform students of the risks of posting private information online.
“Facebook is a fun tool,” Carlson said, “but there’s no reason to look like an idiot in your profile.”