Nearly half of employers look up job candidates on social networks…but your tweets are probably safe
According to a US survey by Careerbuilder.com (source, marketing charts) – 45% – so nearly half, of employers check up on potential staff on social networks. To be honest, I am surprised it’s so low.
29% use Facebook, 26% use LinkedIn and 21% snoop on MySpace. However only one in ten (11%) searched blogs while barely one in twenty (7%) followed candidates on Twitter – the two sources that will often tell you the most.
And what don’t employers want to see on there? 53% of bosses that trawl through social media turned people down for posting “provocative or inappropriate photographs” (inappropriate according to who?) while 44% didn’t give someone a job because they were drinking or using drugs.
My own view is this: I don’t do a Facebook search for candidates as I find that kind of creepy. Despite ‘Facebook is public’ bleating (actually it’s not if you change the privacy settings), I still see Facebook is somewhere where you hang out with friends, and not something for potential bosses to be raking through.
I do however take a cursory look on Twitter – after all, unless someone has protected their settings it is public – and I definitely check through blogs. The latter isn’t even done to look for any skeletons in the closet, rather it normally tells me a lot more about a person’s writing style and interests than a standard CV ever will.
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Hi Anthony, thanks for the comment – Google was to the best of my knowledge not included but I'd be surprised if in most knowledge based industries employers didn't at the very least google candidates.
So yes – that's a good point about twitter results as, in many cases anyway, Twitter profiles will come up via search anyway
Interesting facts, but how about the percentage of employers using Google or other search engines to check up on candidates?
Certainly if Twitter settings are not restricted (and most probably aren't), then they'll pop up in search results if the candidate's name isn't something terribly common, like John Smith. What's more, the very way we tend to use Twitter is as a public forum, so to lock down settings would defeat its purpose.