It’s an old debate, well old so far as social media news goes, but the debate on where to draw the line between professional and personal lives only becomes more pressing with each new way to expose one’s lives.  In a post from the New York Times, an estimated 45% of employers used social networks to screen employees.  An estimated 35% of applicants were then rejected because of the results from those social networks.  Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, the amount of places for employers to find you seem endless.  It’s all getting a little crazy.  What’s next I ask – will my future potential boss try to search out my FourSquared account and judge me based on where I shop for groceries and drink coffee?  Sometimes I ask myself why I even bother writing up a resume when I could just send them my various profiles.

To be fair, networks like LinkedIn are fantastic networking opportunities.  Through sites like LinkedIn and Monster, you can connect with millions of others in your industry and search for jobs much easier and quicker than flipping through a newspaper.  On the negatives though, there is a very uneasily drawn line between what is legal and what is moral.  Legally, a company may have the right to search and find whatever public information you happen to have out there, using it as a means of evaluating you as an employee.  The onus is thus on you to control the access they have to your information – but is this belief just?

In an extreme case, imagine that you are a celebrity…say Brad Pitt (or Angelina).  You have an entire team of publicists out there whose sole purpose it is to control your image – basically what information is out there about you.  Yet despite these people being dedicated full-time to the purpose of controlling your image, there is still tons of unsolicited and incorrect information out there – and much of it is stuff that you are utterly unaware about.  That incorrect, or unsolicited information can have dire consequences; for example, rumours that you are a prima donna convinces some director not to hire you, or faked pictures of you and a mysterious person make major trouble for you with the significant other.  If celebrities cannot control all their information, then how can the entire onus be on a normal person to control their presence on the web?  Yes, you can set your Facebook settings, and yes you should not make stupid tweets about your boss, but is it fair that employers actively search out your private life online?  In the NY Times article, more than half of employers stated “scandalous photos” as the reason why they rejected an applicant.  What one deems as acceptable can vary greatly.  Should we be judged for a simple Halloween costume, or a birthday party?  What if the “bad evidence” is years old?  Or what if you have a very common name and they look at the wrong profile?

As a professional, when you apply for a job, you present your set of skills and abilities that qualify for you for that position.  Granted, your personality is a factor for getting hired, but should only be applied so far as your communication/interpersonal skills and your work ethic.  If employers get to search applicants, then applicants should be presented with a detailed report on the personal lives of the persons interviewing them – then at least you would both be on equal ground!  Our private lives are called that because they should, and deserve to be, private.  Employers do not have the right, in my opinion, to pre-judge and produce biases against our personalities before they even meet us.  Whatever information one may find on the Internet, you will never know that person’s full story.  I realize that many will argue against me, but in this age where privacy already is beginning to seem an antiquated thing, I think it is all the more important to try to make a stand.  All I ask is that we just refrain from throwing stones and instead, sit for a moment in our glass houses.

Related posts:

1. Social networks for sinners
2. How social networking can help you find, lose jobs
3. Facebook: the Hamptons of the Social Network?

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