Did You Party in College? No Need to Apply.
Bowling Green's newspaper has an interesting article on how some employers admit to using social networking sites such as Facebook as part of their background checking efforts.
One employer was quoted in the article as saying that if their background checking company spots students who are depicted as partiers then their applications are rejected. The company, a chemical engineering firm, doesn't want to hire people who party in college. Huh? Are they trying to say that none of their Gen X or Baby Boomer employees partied in college or just that they weren't photographed partying? Or are they really saying that the technology didn't exist 20, 30, or 40 years ago to take a photo of your friend while they're at a party and instantaneously upload it to a social networking Internet site?
Let's be honest with ourselves, folks. My Gen X generation and the older Baby Boomers all partied when we were in college. We all did stupid, immature things. We all wish that we could take back some of what we said, did, and wrote. The only difference between what our older generations did and what Gen Y now does is that the technology now exists to make it incredibly easy and popular to share our antics and those of our friends with the world. Can we honestly say that if the technology existed when we were in college that we wouldn't have uploaded photos and written blog articles about the party we went to last weekend? Is our performance at work any better because of the lack of technology? Of course not.
Totally agree with you Steven and would even go so far as to say those employers that use this type of material as some sort of prescreening device are in for a rude awakening.
Why? I'm reminded, and I swear this isn't a gratuitous reference to sex, of a Slate/NPR story on Girls Gone Wild videos and the fact that a new generation of women are gravitating towards the venue as the ultimate expression of empowerment and freedom. While I'm sure the Women's Suffrage movement wasn't exactly looking towards this as the ultimate destination, I think it says a lot about the times in which we live.
Certainly MySpace et al are just modern versions of the archives that probably exist of the previous generation's fun and games. Any employer that's looking at these sites as a determining factor for employment is probably a little too far removed from their days in college. Most importantly, employers have to ask if an otherwise qualified candidate partied like a rockstar in college, is that person suddenly unable to function in the workplace? If this is the belief, then those same employers had better prepare themselves for a candidate pool they just shrunk by an order of magnitude. And that begets a whole series of problems worse than a candidate having previously streaked the college basketball game while powered by a case of Coors Light.
Of course I say this after shaking my head in disbelief after reading today's WSJ article on panty hose and the workplace. Seriously?
NPR interview is here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1788622
This article really comes as no surprise... let's be honest this is really old news. Nearly every organization with young people has been using FaceBook for the past several years to see who was being recruited.
When we recruit the first filter is aptitude. After that we really only filter for social aspects like "Would I enjoy talking to this person for 5+ minutes?" or "Could I see myself enjoying a beer with this person after work?". Being able to hang out with someone socially and their attitude is nearly as important as their intelligence and skill set.
What this does tell me is that the prospective student is just too lazy to set the privacy filter, so in a way they have no modern-day-web common sense.