Consider this. You have finished the final round of interviews with a hot company. And you nailed it. You are waiting for the offer. And then comes the bad news. You didn’t get the job. And you have no idea why.
Check your social networking page for a possible explanation. Maybe it was the photos of the bachelor party you posted. Perhaps it was the colorful language used by one of your friends who posted on your page. Or, was it that political diatribe you wrote, railing on the socio-economic abuses of the American Capitalistic Business Complex. Whoops!
More and more companies are finding social networking sites to be an excellent window into a candidate’s personality and their potential fit with the company’s culture. It is often more revealing that what can be found by completing a more conventional background check.
Candidates need to take great care that nothing too controversial appears on their social network sites and personal web pages. You never know when it might come back to bite you.
Erica Swallow writes for Mashable, the Social Media news blog covering new websites and social networks, Facebook, Google, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube. Here she states, Social media monitoring service Reppler recently surveyed more than 300 hiring professionals to determine when and how job recruiters are screening job candidates on different social networks. The study found that more than 90% of recruiters and hiring managers have visited a potential candidate’s profile on a social network as part of the screening process. And a whopping 69% of recruiters have rejected a candidate based on content found on his or her social networking profiles — an almost equal proportion of recruiters (68%), though, have hired a candidate based on his or her presence on those networks.
http://mashable.com/2011/10/23/how-recruiters-use-social-networks-to-screen-candidates-infographic/
Be careful out there. Good jobs are hard enough to come by.