Creepin’ at a whole different level

Why potential employers should ignore Facebook.com

Kellen Daly

There is a growing concern among students that employers are using Facebook.com as a mechanism to audit their character, ultimately screening them as a potential employee. If this is an issue you’ve never heard of, you must forgive me, as I am a student of the I.H. Asper School of Business — needless to say I hear about this a daily basis. This practice, however, is detrimental to any company that engages in it and it further speaks to such a company’s questionable character.

Facebook is the latest scapegoat in the long-standing battle between free speech and defamation to have the finger unjustly pointed at it for supposedly propagating unjust behaviours. Like anything else in life, Facebook has its advantages and its disadvantages. Websites like Facebook.com allow us to reveal more about ourselves than we ever could before. The degree of anonymity we enjoyed as 14-year-olds telling people to “Kiss our asses” in various chat rooms, and then laughing about it for 45 minutes afterwards, has disappeared. Internet sites are evolving into personal networking tools, and we must exercise certain caution when using them. As a general rule of thumb, it doesn’t hurt to exercise discretion when revealing personal information to the World Wide Web for anyone to see.

Even so, the fact of the matter remains that if employers want to use Facebook as a substitute for human resources, why is this criticized as a problem? Have at it! If I do not get a job due to the negative impression my Facebook page has on recruiters, then as far as I’m concerned they’ve saved me a lot of time and effort, as that would be an organization I have no interest in working for. I firmly believe that employers using Facebook as a means for screening applicants is a bad practice for several reasons.

First and foremost, the information gained from anyone’s Facebook page has absolutely no relevance to employment and is in no way a predictor of job performance. Further, Facebook is a terrible predicator of whether or not someone will be a good fit for a company. “I’m sorry, Mr. Daly, but we hacked into your Facebook page and it says there that you like the band Radiohead; we here at XYZ Corporation collectively believe that band is terrible and we are really trying to create a homogeneous workforce here. We hope you understand and good luck on your job search!” From an employer’s standpoint, what benefit can one actually expect by only hiring people with the “cleanest” Facebook profiles or people who don’t use Facebook at all (that is, if those people even exist)? Will an organization comprised solely of people with the foresight to remove all photos of them with a beer in their hands from their profiles be more productive than the next company? Of course not. (Although it will likely more boring and monotonous.)

Secondly, by using Facebook in such a manner, employers run the risk of conscious or even subconscious discrimination. Screening applicants based on personal criteria can be a real concern for companies and has been so for decades. This is evident, as many organizations now use group interviews when screening applicants, fearing that by having just one individual administering the group interview a greater risk of systematic discrimination may arise. Many organizations have undertaken a legitimate effort to hire a significant number of diverse employees, for various important reasons ranging from legal defensibility to access to a diverse range of opinions and personalities. Facebook as a screening tool will one day certainly realize that this is not an effective substitute.

Third, with the wide array of methods for employers and recruits to interact with one another, there is absolutely no need to engage in such a weak practice. Especially now, there are so many mechanisms for employers to formulate a good idea of the character and potential of recruits, from informal meet-and-greets to structured employment tests and interviews, that there really is no benefit to using Facebook for such a use. Before being hired, a recruit has met with several people within the organization and often more than once. How does something as irrelevant and impersonal such as a Facebook page add any additional information about someone for an organization?

The final reason to avoid using Facebook in this manner is that, for the most part, it’s just a sleazy thing to do. An organization resorting to such measures does a good job of revealing the poor moral values of the company. Ethics has become a critically important issue within the business world. When seeking employment after graduation, it is in our best interests to wilfully avoid organizations that exhibit weak values. An organization that obtains information about us at all costs is likely to be the same kind of organization that pursues profit at all costs.

So for those of you concerned about employers using Facebook to keep tabs on you, don’t worry. Your job hunt just became a bit easier.

Kellen Daly is a fourth-year commerce student.