One in five employers uses social networks in hiring process
CareerBuilder.com says one third of hiring managers rejected candidates based on what they found — Computerworld) More than one in five employers search social networking sites to screen job candidates …
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2007, some City firms banned Facebook at work, while a separate poll found that many employers restricted employee access to the service. The new hiring-screening figure makes social networks an employment-management issue at both ends: workplace access and candidate evaluation.
CareerBuilder.com is the named source for the survey finding, but the supplied relationship data confirms only that more than one in five employers use social sites to screen candidates; the reported rejection rate is not established here.
First-order effects
- Job candidates’ publicly visible social-network activity becomes an additional input for the employers using these checks, beyond the material submitted in an application.
- Hiring managers at those employers must incorporate informal online findings into their candidate-review process.
Second-order effects
- Employers that had limited Facebook access for staff, as reflected in the 2007 employer-restriction poll, face a sharper split between treating social networks as a workplace distraction and using them as a hiring information source.
- Candidates have an incentive to manage the separation between personal online activity and the professional impression available to recruiters.
Third-order effects
- If employer screening becomes more widespread, social-network profiles may function as a persistent, employer-readable layer of the job market rather than solely a communications channel.
- The practice shifts hiring scrutiny toward information controlled by platforms and users’ posting choices, raising the stakes of how employers interpret informal online material.
The trend: Social networks are moving from an employee-access policy concern into an auxiliary layer of employer screening and hiring evaluation.