The Young Professional Facebook Paradox
Allowing colleagues and co-workers to view your Facebook and MySpace page has been a conflict my friends and I have struggled with since graduating from college. Is it appropriate to allow your workplace access to your college pictures? And more importantly, will we be judged based upon these pictures? This argument has plagued my generation. When the following question came across our ASAE listserv, I couldn’t wait to see what other people thought. The original post was from a communications company looking to hire an assistant. While the employer was browsing applicants’ Facebook pages, they found “stuff that was disturbing and raises questions about the suitability for a couple of the candidates.” The employer wanted to know if it was appropriate to mention/question an applicant about his or her Facebook profile, and was “looking for tips on how to navigate this situation.” The listserv took off like rapid fire as my inbox proceeded to be inundated with opinions and tips from all over the map!
Some people felt the candidates should have cleaned up their Facebook page and that my generation is too open with social networking. One woman stated, “Bottom line: I think job seekers should be savvy enough to know their stuff is out there and self-censor, or not, as they feel is appropriate. A friend of mine de-activated her totally tame profile for a while during a federal hiring process, and I think that’s wise in this climate.” This really made me think: De-activate my profile over a frat party in college? Get real?!?!
The beauty of Facebook is being able to keep in touch with numerous people, as you can send messages, write on their wall, and even tag pictures of events you have participated in. In a day and age where time is valuable, it makes keeping in touch easy. I immediately knew there would be one person who could relate to me on this issue. “Pat you have to come in here. I can’t believe this,” I yelled to Pat Cauley, whose office is across the hall from mine. He was in shock too, “Do they even know how Facebook started?” he asked. “Obviously not, we have to set the record straight.” Pat and I collaborated and came up with this Listserv response, “I joined Facebook in the fall of 2004 as a college junior. At the time you needed an .edu e-mail address to even join the site, as it was an online social diary/interactive yearbook. As the place where we like to connect with and keep in touch with college and high school friends, this should not represent a young professional’s work ethic or ability. Imagine if your employment qualifications were based upon your pictures from Woodstock that suddenly surfaced online.” Again, my inbox was like rapid fire—e-mail, e-mail, e-mail, I couldn’t believe how many responses. Some responses agreed with my view while others didn’t. However, I found the most surprising post came from a CAE (certified association executive). He has hired two people in the past six to eight months and actually passed on dozens of applicants who had no findable Internet content. Why? He felt just because questionable behavior wasn’t on Facebook, doesn’t mean the applicant didn’t partake. He decided he knew more about those applicants who were engaged on the social web than those who weren’t.
So, I guess you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t? I welcome you to check out my page and let me know what you think. Or better yet, why doesn’t everyone relax and enjoy this humorous infomercial parody video of Facebook.
Katie White is ERA’s retailer relations manager.
Tags: asae listserv, college, Electronic Retailer, ERA, facebook, katie white, myspace, pictures, young professionals
July 3rd, 2008 at 11:52 am
What I see evolving is LinkedIn as the “Facebook” for a person’s professional side and MySpace and Facebook as the place for personal expression, just like a personal blog. Society’s quest for political correctness threatens to sanitize us into a bunch of Dilbert-like drones. Does anybody really want that?
July 4th, 2008 at 7:15 am
Facebook is a generational idea that has flourished in a time of Reality TV, MTV, Spring Break and COLLEGE. This is the first media driven generation and it is no surprise that this form of communication would become popular. Each individual can have their own form of self expression and a tiny bit of celebrity. As far as employing these young people, a Facebook page will not indicate the true character of a person, the same way reality TV is not really real. So employers keep off the Facebook, leave that to the young peoople and let them have their moment of celebrity. As we all know as we get older, those moments are short-lived.
July 7th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
http://jobs.aol.com/article/_a/83-percent-of-recruiters-look-for/20080617164309990003?ncid=AOLCOMMjobsDYNLprim0001&icid=100214839×1205370982x1200246084
July 17th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Much like the author, I joined Facebook at a time when it was still an exclusive clique of .edu verified email addresses. When job-hunting began, I struggled with the “Will my employer view this?” dilemma… One very simple feature made it easy to decide: Privacy controls! This can remedy the entire situation. Your prospective employers can see that you have a Facebook account and are a web-savvy person, but they can’t openly access the account’s content. Altering settings to allow only friends or certain networks the ability to view your profile is easy to do, and keeps those frat party pics for selected-eyes-only.
I don’t think it’s unwise on the party of employers to check this out, and agree that if you’re not savvy enough or don’t have commen sense enough to either make private or remove too-racy info, then maybe you don’t deserve the job! I know at a previous company we didn’t hire someone based on the questionable (and very dark) content of their Myspace page. Did it necessarily mean they were a bad person? Of course not. But does a first impression matter? Absolutely. Bottom line: Just privatize it!
July 21st, 2008 at 3:18 pm
This certainly does beg the question: how much are our personal and professional worlds blurring? And, is that blurring inevitable given the same blur in media and human mobility.