25 August 2008

Could a Facebook Profile Cost You a Job?

Career services officers are said to be warning college students that employers sometimes look up the profiles of potential hires on Facebook and other 'social networking' websites – and may turn away candidates on the basis of what they find there.

Campus newspapers from the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, and elsewhere have recently published articles on the possibility of a Facebook profile coming back to haunt a grad when he or she looks for employment.

Liz Michaels, director of Career and Planning Services at the University of Chicago, is quoted in an April 18 article in the Chicago Maroon as saying that students should be cautious about what they post on the Internet. "While employers have long been able to complete a Google search of someone’s name, the content on these sites [Facebook and similar sites] tend to be much more damaging," Michaels is quoted as saying. "Students should assume that whatever is on the Web will be there for a very long time and will come up when anyone, including a future employer, searches for them."

A career services officer at Princeton took a more skeptical view, telling the Maroon reporter that "very few employers I speak with talk about using these sites as a regular part of the recruiting process." She agreed, however, that "if an employer wishes to gain more information about an applicant and the information is available to them, I think it’s a reasonable expectation that they will consider it."

Frankly, we think this story has the whiff of an urban legend about it. For one thing, it appeared just as college seniors began looking in earnest for post-graduation employment – and, as any sociologist could tell you, urban legends are often more about expressing fears and frustrations than they are about actual information.

On top of that, the story just doesn't make sense. Employers have their own ways of judging the character of job prospects, and they don't involve Facebook. We can't imagine most employers taking the time to look interviewees up on every one of the half-dozen popular social networking sites. (Any employer who would spend his or her time that way is no one you'd want to work for, anyway.)

That said, the point that the Chicago and Princeton career services officials make about the potential for something you publish on the Internet to harm your job or career prospects is valid. It's just common sense to exercise good judgment about the image you project to the rest of the world. If you do want to use Facebook or LiveJournal to share your exploits with a far-flung circle of friends, take the precaution of controlling who can access your posts – and think about cleaning up your old entries before you leave campus for the outside world.

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