Employers Looking at Political Orientation
We've all heard the stories about how social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook can be dangerous to job seekers when those people post on-line what most people would deem to be embarrassing photos or stories about themselves. After all, what employer is going to trust the judgment of a candidate who posts a MySpace page about herself and uses it to brag about how she likes to get drunk and have sex with strangers?
But what about candidates who make their political beliefs known in a low key way? One of the basic questions that Facebook asks, for example, is your political orientation. Your options include very liberal, liberal, moderate, conservative, very conservative, apathetic, liberatarian, and other. Unless you change your default settings, which most don't, your choice shows up for all to see. But what if your employer or potential employer sees your choice?
Let's assume that you're a recent college grad, very liberal, and applying for a job with an employer owned by someone who is very conservative. Are they going to look favorably upon your application? Unlikely. But what if the owner is also very liberal and the other finalist for the position is very conservative? It seems to me that you your publicized political orientation will help you in a situation like that. So telling the world your political orientation could be a double edged sword in that it will at times help and at other times hurt your opportunities.
Still, I can't help but feel uneasy about where this is taking us. I'd hate to see candidates lose job opportunities for expressing their political views in such a non-confrontational manner. This isn't a situation where they're shouting from rooftops or even criticizing politicians or political parties or political philosophies with which they don't agree. They're just stating their political orientation on a page that an employer would have to choose to visit and the statement is pretty subdued.
Should candidates suffer the consequences if they apply to work for an organization run by someone with different political leanings? If so, doesn't that mean that we are self-censoring one of the most important types of speech?
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