More than a third of all job seekers accept that employers are entitled to check out their social media profiles when assessing them for a role, according to a new poll from Hays.
However, while 34% of the 900 candidates surveyed expected employers to check their social media profile and found this acceptable, a larger group – some 46%, felt employers were invading their privacy by screening them on social media.
The remaining 20% of candidates didn’t think employers were checking them out online.
Hays director Grahame Doyle said the majority of job seekers seemed to feel that “their personal life is their personal life, and their social media profile should not be used as part of the [recruitment] decision-making process”.
However, he noted there was a a sizeable group who believed that any actions that took place in the public domain were open to public scrutiny and assessment.
“In our experience, most employers do not leap to check a candidate’s online profile.
“It is far more common that an employer will extend their vetting process to include social media only if they feel a candidate might not be what they are portraying themselves to be in their face-to-face interview.”
In any event, he said, it was common sense for people searching for a job to change their privacy settings so not all of their posted content was shared.
He noted that it wasn’t just the main social media sites that candidates should be worried about, as employers that were using the internet to research candidates “will not stop at Facebook”.
Employers were also looking at content uploaded to video-sharing sites like YouTube, online forums and blogs, comments on social bookmarking sites (like Digg and Reddit), and much else, Doyle said.
Shortlist has covered the legal ins and outs of candidate privacy and social media previously.
This article appeared in Shortlist News, an email service providing the latest news and analysis on recruitment and human capital management
Tags: hays, social media, social networking
