CMU School of Drama


Thursday, March 10, 2011

What If a Potential Employer Wants to See Your Facebook Page?

College Candy: "I recently heard about an individual applying for a job who was asked by the hiring manager to bring up his Facebook page. The individual was shocked, but did so because he wasn’t sure how to refuse.
What would you do if this happened to you? Does an employer even have the right to ask this, especially when Facebook is supposed to be something you only allow your “friends,” or people you have approved, to see? Perhaps not. But if you say no, are you improving or hurting your chances for getting the job?

4 comments:

Sonia said...

I think that it is completely appropriate and within their right for a potential employer to ask to see your facebook page. Because even though you can make it private your facebook page is in the public domain, and can say a lot about you. If you have nothing compromising on your page why should you care if they want to see it? Its not like theyre asking to see your private messages. And if you do have compromising material on there why do you have it up there anyway? Because it makes you look cool that you can get really drunk and do dumb things? Regardless if your employer asks to see it, there should be no reason to say no. I think that creating a dummy page or doing some of the things suggested by this article could become dangerous in the event that they could find out that you are lying. In any case it is good to be upfront in an interview and if being honest hurts your chances then maybe that wasnt the job for you.

emilyannegibson said...

Of course you have the right to say no, but I think you should not have anything that might compromise your employment. If I was interviewing someone, and they refused to bring up the page, I would probably be suspicious. There is no need to have anything online like that which you would be ashamed of showing. However, the only reason I can think of a potential employer asking to see it is to "catch" the interviewee. I mean, what kind of information is on there that the employer actually would care about? Your favourite quotes and movies? How many friends you have? If you and your significant other are "Facebook offical"? None of those things actually matter to an employer, so the only reason for them to request to see it is to make sure you aren't a wild thing. Just be sensible, I'd say, and have no reason to feel like you need to deny the employer's request.

ZoeW said...

This is a little scary. Even though I don't have anything on my Facebook that I wouldn't want my employer to see, I still wouldn’t want them looking at my profile. Facebook is your personal life, not your professional life. If you are stupid enough to not change your settings to private so that people can't see you’re profile then you kind of have it coming but to be asked to show your facebook in an interview I think is a little out of line. I think if asked you should show it, but I don't think that that makes it ok for employers to ask. Also I would question why this employer needs to know. Why do they need to know if you are in a relationship, or if you have lots of pictures of yourself on vacation in Australia? There is a reason that you bring what you bring to an interview because that is what is professional and that is the information that is what should be important to your employer. Lastly Facebook is just going to give you confusing information or information that is wrong. People can look very different on Facebook from how they really are.

Daniel L said...

In this industry, Facebook is a handy tool; it turns out that a lot of people of all ages, calibers and locales in audio have facebook pages, and the 'mutual friends' listing for someone with whom you'd like to make contact can be quite helpful.

With regards to privacy, I agree with everybody about limiting the content you allow on your page at all, and I further limit who can see what. For instance, Boevers cannot see my wall and photos even though we are friends, but Sonia can.