In Carolyn Elefant’s blog post, “Do Employers Using Facebook for Background Checks Face Legal Risks?” she discusses how employers generally like to look at the profile of somebody’s Facebook page to determine whether to hire them. Before they were told to stop “requiring applicants to submit photographs or inquiring about marital status or age to avoid accusations that they were rejecting a candidate for discriminatory reasons” (Elefant). Though they have access to the same things now, I do not think they should be stopped from viewing them. They should be able to research their applicants, but not for the qualities seen above. The employer should be able to see what kind of person they are, past just what is written on their resume and how they act at their interview. In an interview an applicant is probably more likely to lie than on the internet.
On social networking sites like Facebook people sometimes go wild bragging to their friends about doing drugs or drinking. The employer could get an insight to what this person is like, if they are rude or not. An employer would not want an employee that would come into work drunk or high, and act rudely towards customers. But, as important as it is for employees to come to work in a suitable condition, an employer should not deny them a job if they admitted to doing drugs or drinking on their profile. An employer perhaps should meet with this person first, to question them on these sort of things to make sure that poor performance at work does not result from their lifestyle outside of work. If they lied about this in the interview and the employer found out about it later on Facebook, then, most definitely, a meeting should be arranged.
A Facebook page is open to the public, and it’s the user’s responsibility to maintain their public image if they do not want certain information shown to the public. There are privacy settings for most of everything, and the employer does not have to see what you do not want to see. Even if there are things that should not be seen by a potential employer, why is it there in the first place? People need to remember that the internet is public no matter what, and with enough digging a person can find anything you put on there. I personally would never put anything on my Facebook page that an employer would find to be something to consider my employment with them. I would not mind if an employer looked at my Facebook page because I feel that they have a right to, being responsible to the business that would be paying me. If I were to turn out to be a terrible employee they would have wasted money in hiring me and finding out later that it was a waste of time.
Even with all the information out there, there is only so much an employer can judge to hire an employee. They have to keep their opinions out and not consider an employee for their gender, race, marital status, age, political status, and many more reasons (Elefant). But even the smallest amount of information is enough to tell what a person could be like once employed. If employers are very careful in how they make their decisions on hiring someone, not taking into account other things that have nothing to do with job performance, then using Facebook can be a helpful tool in checking out a potential employee.
Elefant, Carolyn. “Do Employers Using Facebook for Background Checks Face Legal Risks?”
LegalBlogWatch.Typepad.com. Legal Blog Watch, 11 March, 2008. Web. 03 Dec. 2011.
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