Online Reputation

Online Reputation The Paradox of Your Online Reputation The use of social networks as a means to screen potential employees, in addition to monitoring existing employee's lifestyles, has emerged as a common practice in many companies globally today. The fact that advertisers spend $6B advertising on social networks this year, up 72% from 2010 shows the future of these networks, they are meant for selling profile information to the highest bidder (Hof, 2011).

The three aspects of the ethicacy of social network use, from screening candidates, to monitoring employees and finally the legality of using them for sales prospecting by other industries including insurance and lawyers are discussed here. Evaluating Job Candidates on Social Networks The privacy settings on Facebook have been the subject of many studies and debates in legal, marketing and social sciences with Facebook stating that once the data is on their platform it is considered public (McKenzie, 2011).

This places high school and college students in a unique and potentially challenging situation, as they are most likely to share pictures and comments entirely appropriate for their friends but potentially inappropriate for a new employer. The danger of using social networks alone to evaluate potential employees is that the context can easily be taken out of context, and if a human resources manager or hiring decision maker takes a negative view to a candidate, content on their Facebook or social networking sites can be used against them.

I think it is best for hiring managers and HR professionals to see social networking in the context of the total person, not judging them by their Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn profile alone but by who they really are. Admittedly Facebook has become a magnet for self-promotion and is turning into a narcissist's paradise especially for baby boomers wanting to show off their latest cars, planes, homes and trophy wives.

Ironically the executives on Facebook who are hard-core narcissists will never be fired from their senior management roles for these and other excesses including openly cheating on their wives. Yet the double standard falls hard on the younger workers just entering the workforce for lesser indiscretions. What recruiters need to realize is that they are catching a glimpse of a person during their process of becoming who they are right now -- and judging anyone just on their social networking content alone is wrong.

Granted there are the pictures of extreme partying and heavy drinking, even provocative pictures women put on Facebook to attract young men -- and these are what make for great news ratings and thousands of hits to news sites. Yet the majority of young professionals exercise restraint and judgment. It's time to keep social networks in context and not consider it the entire truth of who a person is. Monitoring Employees on Social Networks The monitoring of employees without their knowledge is ethically wrong.

Just as an employee cannot order an audit of a privately held company, so the same must hold true for a company attempting to gain information on employees. Spying on employees on Facebook is tantamount to placing a video recorder on a person's bedroom window and recording their movements away from the office on their own time.

It's a violation of trust with the employees and those that are fired due to what is on their profile page, when it has nothing to do with their ability to do their jobs, need to have legal recourse. Advertising from Professional Services Firms on Social Networks The hard reality of Facebook is that they sell profile information and by many estimates generate well over $1B in revenue already on advertising alone (Hof, 2011). When they go public that data will be shared.