Social Network Screening on the Rise

A new report indicates that one in ten employers are looking at an applicant’s social networking profile.

More than 60 percent said the information they see on these profiles will influence what they think about the job candidate, and more importantly, who gets hired and who doesn’t… Employers have a lot of leeway when deciding who they should and should not hire. Unless an applicant is being discriminated against because of race, age, gender, or ethnicity, there is very little the applicant can complain about later on.

I’ve been trying to warn people about this for a long time now. This all goes back to controlling your online image. Everybody goes out once in a while and gets a little plastered, but not everybody proudly displays photographic proof on their profiles.

With social networking becoming increasingly pervasive, it is becoming harder and harder to stay off the grid. That said, whatever part of you is on sites such as Myspace or Facebook needs to be tempered. This raises some scary questions about the future since I think social networks will eventually use an open directory system that centralizes the data in a decentralized distributed grid. When that happens, it will be very hard protecting your identity and image between different sites while still keeping it an accurate reflection of you.

Still, I can’t wait for elections in 2020 when the first of the Myspace kids begin running for president. I just know there will be a scandal around something they posted when they were 18. Accountability for lasts a life time now that the Internet caches everything.