Social networking sites like Facebook or Linkedin are becoming increasingly popular and are unavoidable in day to day life. A recent GRB poll of 500 students said that 73% felt it was an invasion of privacy for an employer to "snoop" on their profile so what's a recruiter to do?
Making the best recruitment decision comes down to having as much information on a potential candidate in order to judge their suitability. Typically we resort to CVs, Interviews, Assessment Centres and the like but now employers are including social networking sites as another slice of information on which to base their decision.
There are no rules restricting the use of these sites however employers run the risk of attracting claims for discrimination. For instance if an employer announced she was pregnant and as a result you retract an employment offer you could liable if there is any documentation pertaining to show that this announcement led to the retraction.
I think most employers understand students make the most of university life and now have a way to express this openly online. To other generations this seems way too revealing and question why they would want to let the world see some of the things that get posted but unless something is seriously anti-social, illegal or defamatory users of social networking sites should have nothing to fear. For selectors, by all means take a look once the decision has been made to hire someone but where it can really help is especially if you have a few people starting as you can contact them all through Facebook and get them talking to each other before they start. See it as a pre-induction strategy to spend time communicating with employees before they start which will help them settle in better to your firm and everyone benefits.
