Social Media and job hunting

Two recent articles on this subject caught my eye. The first is from Forbes Magazine and was posted August 8th, the title of the blog is Employers Look to Facebook for Job Recruits by Joe Arico. In his post Mr. Arico claims: Companies are starting to view Facebook as a legitimate option to find new employees, as LinkedIn and more traditional job boards face unexpected competition from the mammoth social network.

According to analysts, companies now drift to Facebook because the social network boasts 750 million users, many of whom are potential employees. Employers are no longer looking to spend hundreds of dollars to put up job postings on paid websites or in newspapers when they can reach millions of people for free by advertising jobs on their Facebook pages.

LinkedIn is still the dominant form of social networking for professional businesses, but more employers have found Facebook’s larger user base and more personal profile system invaluable when looking for job candidates.This is good and bad news for job seekers. The good news is that they can check out a company using Facebook. The bad news is that the company can check them out, not only their recent history but the company can look back over the last seven years of a prospective employees social network posts. That according to the second post  Infographic: 5 Ways You Can Lose a Job on Facebook By Sara Yin published n Infograpics on August 8th.   Ms. Yin states in her post that: (The links n the part of the article shared here are interesting in that it shows how companies are using this information.)

"This June, the Federal Trade Commission approved the creation of a "Social Intelligence Report" that lets private companies archive your social media activities for up to seven years, for "compliance" reasons. A human resources manager can hire consultants, like those at the Social Intelligence Corporation, to compile a report of what you've posted across all your social networks (kind of like how a landlord checks your credit score). Social Intelligence Corporation's CEO Max Drucker told Social Media Today that they generally flag four types of posts in their reports: racially insensitive remarks, sexually explicit materials, flagrant displays of weaponry, and other demonstrations of clearly illegal activity. Getting fired over Facebook for trigger-happy posts can't be all that difficult, especially if you're one of the 250 million members who access Facebook through a cell phone app.

All this is confirmed in the infographic below, created by MindFlash and based on a 2009 survey from CareerBuilder. It's a bit old, but it does remind us that Facebook screening results in more people losing jobs (or opportunities for jobs) than getting them. It also shows how much more influential the Palo Alto-based network is over other social networks, like Twitter and LinkedIn, which are notably more open. We can't wait to see this infographic eventually updated with Google+.

If you use social media, keep your settings very private if you don't want prospective or current employers to know what you are doing online.