If we don’t like your Facebook profile you wont get into college and we won’t hire you! - Social Networking for your Personal Life Versus your Professional Life.
Increasingly there have been reports such as this about social networking websites, in particular Facebook. So by setting up an account with Facebook are you significantly decreasing your chances of getting that next job or inadvertently black-listing yourself from a college course? Not exactly…
Last week, both the Irish Times and the Guardian Newspapers had articles about this topic. Facebook, with 59 million active users, has a current growth rate of over 2 million new users a week. There are daily news items about the website; last week alone saw journalists discussing issues such as debating the privacy security of the website (related to this post but nonetheless deserves it’s own post if not an entire article at a later date!) and the websites possibility of copyright infringement of Hasbro and Mattel’s Scrabble game (Facebook’s online version “Scrabulous”). However, I would like to focus on one issue in this post - will Facebook prevent you getting hired for a job or cause you not to get a place in college?
Simply put, no. You yourself, however, can utilise any social networking website, or any communication medium for that matter, to publish information about yourself, your attitudes, lifestyle or opinions that may not give a prospective employer or admissions tutor that great an impression of you as a working professional or as a prospective student. It is afterall not illegal to google someone, regardless of whether you are an employer or not. I don’t see why people can’t either set their Facebook profiles to private and take care in adding ‘friends’ to their profile (call me niave but I used to think that it was quality over quantity that mattered most in friendships) or else why can’t they set up two profiles; a personal profile for their friends (which is set to private) and a professional profile for their work colleagues, career networks and so forth? Yes, of course there will be times in your professional life when you may encounter situations where social and business obligations overlap and the same can be true of social networking. For example, most people surely will build up friendships with the people that they were in college with and similarly with work colleagues but the old adage has to be true in any working environment; don’t mix business with pleasure. It is possible to keep your professional and private lives intact all while having some fun with social networking websites such as FaceBook, MySpace, and Bebo. I don’t think it is that hard to be able to be yourself while letting common sense guide you.
Losing face:
— Photographs of Amy Polumbo, Miss New Jersey, posing with pumpkins held to her chest led to an alleged blackmail, and the national Miss America organisation reviewing whether she was fit to hold her crown. The pictures, from her Facebook profile, were splashed across American newspapers
— A survey of 600 British companies revealed that one in five had logged on to Facebook and other networking websites to vet potential employees. Jacqueline Thomson, from public relations firm Brands2Life, said that she had turned down one applicant after learning that he had used Facebook “to criticise previous employers and discuss company information”
— In Toronto, Canada, five students were banned from a school trip after disparaging remarks about teachers were found on Facebook
— Brad Karsh, a US career consultant, turned down a job applicant after reading on Facebook that his interests were “smokin’ blunts with the homies” and “shooting caps into whitie”
— A university in Pennsylvania denied a 27-year-old woman a teaching degree on the grounds that she was promoting under-age drinking, after she posted a photo of herself on Facebook, titled “Drunken Pirate”
— Several students at DePauw University, Indiana, were disciplined after college authorities used Facebook to trace those responsible for vandalising a sculpture of a deer
Source: Times database.
Related Links:
- “Caught on camera – and found on Facebook” by Patrick Foster, The Times
- “Would-be students checked on Facebook” by Jessica Shepherd and David Shariatmadari, The Guardian
- “To Blog or Not to Blog?” by Alison Doyle, About.com
- “How to Blog Safely.“ by Electronic Frontier Foundation
- “Facebook, MySpace et al. ” by Evil HR Lady
- “Facebook and employment: an equal opportunity information trap” by Denise Howell, ZDnet
- “How to use Facebook without Losing Your Job over it” on internet-duct-tape
- “How to Avoid Getting Fired by Facebook” by lifehack.org
- “Hire profile” by Hazel Davis, The Guardian