Employees, Employers, and Social Media
Social media already plays a huge role in the hiring or firing process for employers. As we all know, many employers will check up on an interviewee’s social media pages to see how they present themselves online — Is their Facebook profile filled with nothing but photos of them drinking and partying hard all the time? Do they post rants about the company or industry that they’re applying for? Are they making violent threats or other posts which people would find inappropriate?
The workplace can often extend past the physical workplace into the cyber world as well. Unless you have the strictest security settings applied, your online profiles and persona can be accessed by nearly everyone, including prospective employers and customers/clients. What are they going to think if they viewed your page? Does your online persona match that of how you present yourself in the real world? Even if you’re just trolling for fun, how do employers or clients know that you’re not serious? These are all factors that will not affect the hiring, firing and job searching process in the future — these are things that have been happening for years.
I can see employers only getting more strict and intense on their investigations into prospective employees by searching through their social media page. I can only imagine how much screening governments and jobs requiring certain security clearances go through before hiring a prospective employee. As people catch on to this, is there going to be a portion of our society who craft an online persona specifically for job searching? One could say that social media platforms such as LinkedIn already provide an outlet for professional personas, but how long until this culture extends to Facebook and Instagram?
I can certainly see a future where individuals have two kinds of social media accounts on the same platform: one for professionalism and one for their “true” self. This is already the case when we examine how people use different social media platforms. For example, someone may have a professional Facebook page, but also have a Reddit account which will have no personal identifiers so the person can feel free to post whatever opinion they want, no matter how controversial it may be.
I would not even be surprised if in the future, employers create fake social media accounts in order to connect with prospective employees and bait them into revealing how they truly present themselves online (I wouldn’t even be surprised if this is already going on). We live in an age where personal social media is already monitored by government agencies looking for troublemakers, so how long until employers begin doing this as well?
Since there are already algorithms for data mining running on social media, how long before employers are able to access this information in order to find the prospective employees that they feel would be a good fit for their company? As creepy as it may be, I would not object to a company randomly giving me a job offer out of the blue because they saw my social media page, have determined I am qualified for the position based on information found from data mining, and feel that I present myself well online. I think it would be a fantastic, albeit creepy wonder of technology if employers were the ones seeking out candidates based on data mining through social media rather than the candidates seeking out employers through job ads. Similarly, wouldn’t it be awful if employers used this same data mining technique to fire people?
