Re: Job Seekers Asked For Facebook Passwords
Martial Salleh
(MoneyWatch) The good news is that the job market is heating up (Admittedly that only takes it from stone-cold to tepid, but prospects are better than they've been in at least three years.) The bad news is that employers are increasingly asking job seekers for their Facebookand other social-media passwords as part of the process of vetting them.
While it's unclear how widespread that practice is, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that it is happening with increasing frequency, as CBS MoneyWatch's Suzanne Lucas details. You can, of course, refuse to give a job interviewer your passwords. But expect your employment application to hit the round file, or the trash, if you don't cooperate.
"It's important to understand that more and more employers are looking at whatever they can to inform them in the hiring decision," says John Challenger, chief executive of global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. "Whether it's a photo from a college party posted on Facebook or an incendiary comment on Twitter, employers are looking for anything that reveals more than candidates typically share in interviews."
It's interesting to note that a company asking for your passwords obviates any efforts you might have made to create privacy settings that separate your professional side from your social life.This gives employers access to everything -- private or not.
Is that fair? Maybe not. But it's not illegal, nor overtly discriminatory. While social media can be a huge help for job applicants, allowing them to network widely and disseminate resumes to friends, friends of friends, and distant acquaintances, there's also a down side.
Challenger expects the courts to eventually rule on whether employer access to your private information should be limited, particularly when you're applying for a job that doesn't require a security clearance. In the meantime, here are five things you should keep in mind about social media and work:
Recruiters troll LinkedIn. Put as much care -- or more -- into designing and feeding your LinkedIn profile as you do your resume, Challenger says. Keep it constantly updated. Recruiters are increasingly trolling the site to find qualified candidates, whether or not they have applied for a position. Recommendations are important, and are equivalent to good references. Don't be shy about asking former employers and colleagues to praise you online (and be willing to return the favor).
Privacy settings still matter. Even though some employers are getting past people's privacy settings by asking for passwords, this is a relatively unusual step, Challenger says. It's far more common for employers to look at what you've made public on Facebook than at what you've kept private. If you haven't separated the professional from the personal, do it before you apply for work.
Leave religion and politics at home. Just as you wouldn't bring up your political or religious views in a job interview, you shouldn't make them part of the public forum on Facebook. To be sure, some people will agree with you and like you more for it. But others will eliminate you without your knowledge simply because they disagree with your political views. If you want to discuss heated topics like religion and politics, do it among friends and behind privacy settings.
Prepare to be polite. You may think that asking for your social media passwords is so out of bounds that it sends you into a screaming rage. But realize that recruiters go to trade association meetings and talk. You don't want to be a poster job-hunter as the most outrageous interview rant -- no matter how justified. On the other hand, it's hard to complain about somebody who calmly declines an inappropriate request by saying, "I'd be happy to direct you to my public profile, but I only share my personal life with close friends and family."
Tweet and post professionally. While your unprofessional party photos and impolitic posts could cost you a job, sharing appropriate articles and white-papers about your industry can raise your professional profile, much like giving speeches and writing articles of your own, says Challenger. If you want to make social media work for you, work it.
A troubling trend in the U.S. job market has seen applicants crying foul over efforts to gain access to their social networks and legislators hastening to protect them from such measures, but experts north of the border say Canadians have much less to worry about.
Labour laws in Canada offer strong protection from employers who ask job seekers for personal information such as social media passwords, lawyers said. Rules in the U.S. are much more lax, they said, citing several cases in which prospective hiring managers have asked candidates to turn over their login information as part of the vetting process.
Labour matters generally fall under the jurisdiction of the provinces, but federal laws are also in place to help protect personal information, he said. Legislation across the board is more stringent than what's in place in the U.S., he said.
While there are no laws in place that specifically deal with social media, Cavaluzzo said the country's legal tradition makes the issue fairly clear-cut. The presence of privacy commissioners at both orders of government offers yet another safeguard for a wary public, he added.
Robert Collins of Maryland was asked to hand over his Facebook password so a hiring manager could properly evaluate his application to be reinstated as a prison guard. Collins said he was told his profile would be scoured for evidence of gang connections.
Other anecdotes suggest candidates have been asked to log onto their social networks on computers at the job site or requested to become friends with a hiring manager while still in the interview process.
Opponents of such practices decry them as serious privacy violations, with one law professor likening the request for passwords to handing over housekeys to a prospective boss. Employers that have gone on record about such tactics say candidates are free to refuse such requests if it makes them uncomfortable.
Job seekers are perfectly within their right to ask employers to explain their motives behind questions they find intrusive, she said. Employers often have valid reasons for probing into a person's background, but may use awkward or even inappropriate means to obtain the information.
"As a candidate, you're also in a position of power," Khamisa said. "When you are asked a question of this nature, it's worth considering and doing a little bit of probing to see, is that an employer you want to be working for."
Companies sometimes make use of social media as part of the online application process. Job hunters are given the choice to apply for positions through their social media profiles, then asked to allow a third-party application to send personal details back to the company.
Cavaluzzo and Khamisa say the practice has not been common in their experience, and Canadian companies seem unwilling to adopt strategies at play in the U.S. Sears Holdings Inc., for instance, makes use of third-party software to track work histories of its American job applicants, but Sears Canada spokeswoman Alicia Richler said the company has never entertained the idea north of the border.
Social media author and strategist Amber MacArthur said online privacy is essentially a misnomer, noting details posted to a relatively secure profile could go public with one mouse click from a rogue contact.
The best way to avoid embarrassment, she stressed, is to control the information flow at its source. MacArthur keeps her own profiles completely free of personal details and urges jobseekers to do the same.
"I wish that was a practice that more people followed," she said. "I could talk about privacy forever in terms of the different settings within Facebook, but the reality is . . . I don't think you'll ever be able to have a truly private experience online. You may want to look at what you are sharing and try and clean up your act a little bit."
When Justin Bassett interviewed for a new job, he expected the usual questions about experience and references. So he was astonished when the interviewer asked for something else: his Facebook username and password.
Bassett, a New York City statistician, had just finished answering a few character questions when the interviewer turned to her computer to search for his Facebook page. But she couldn't see his private profile. She turned back and asked him to hand over his login information.
Bassett refused and withdrew his application, saying he didn't want to work for a company that would seek such personal information. But as the job market steadily improves, other job candidates are confronting the same question from prospective employers, and some of them cannot afford to say no.
In their efforts to vet applicants, some companies and government agencies are going beyond merely glancing at a person's social-networking profiles and instead asking to log in as the user to have a look around.
Questions have been raised about the legality of the practice, which is also the focus of proposed legislation in Illinois and Maryland that would forbid public agencies from asking for access to social networks.
Since the rise of social networking, it has become common for managers to review publicly available Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts and other sites to learn more about job candidates. But many users, especially on Facebook, have their profiles set to private, making them available only to selected people or certain networks.
Companies that don't ask for passwords have taken other steps - such as asking applicants to log in to a company computer during an interview. Once employed, some workers have been required to sign non-disparagement agreements that ban them from talking negatively about an employer on social media.
Back in 2010, Robert Collins was returning to his job as a correctional officer at the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services after taking leave following his mother's death. During a reinstatement interview, he was asked for his login and password, purportedly so the agency could check for any gang affiliations. He was stunned by the request but complied.
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