More Employers Use Social Networks to Screen Candidates
The number of employers who look at social-networking sites when screening job applicants is rising and it’s especially common for those hiring in IT, according to recent survey data from CareerBuilder.
In a survey of more than 2,600 hiring managers conducted in June, 45 percent said they use social-networking sites to research job candidates, up from 22 percent who said so last year. Another 11 percent plan to start the practice, reports Cincinnati.com.
Twenty-nine percent said they use Facebook, 26 percent look on LinkedIn and others use MySpace (21 percent), blogs (11 percent) and Twitter (7 percent). IT was the industry most likely to do so with 63 percent saying they do, followed by business services (53 percent). Thirty-five percent of employers said they had rejected a candidate based on what they found on those sites, according to TG Daily.
There are some real legal pitfalls with that, as Jacqueline Klosek, who practices privacy law at Goodwin Procter, told ITBE’s Lora Bentley recently in an interview.