It has been out in the open for some time that prospective employers are googling their applicants and browsing applicants’ social networking sites. In order to get a more complete picture of whom they might be hiring, employers will get on an applicant’s Facebook page or follow their Twitter posts. Because of these types of situations, we recommend that your privacy settings need to be set to strong and that you be careful about what pictures, status updates, and tweets you post.
However, some potential employers are going too far. A recent article in Insurance Journal found that “some companies and government agencies are going beyond merely glancing at a person’s social networking profiles and instead are asking to log in as the user to have a look around.”* And “Companies that don’t ask for passwords have taken other steps – such as asking applicants to friend human resources managers or to log in to a company computer during an interview.”
We understand that employers want to know the truth about their applicants, but this could be considered an invasion of personal privacy.
Readers, what do you think?
If an employer you interview with asks for your Facebook user name and password, would you give it to them? Please tell us, why or why not?
Friending them would be o.k. with me but giving out my password and login information would not. With that information, they could post anything and it would appear as if I did the posting. I think there is a stopping point and that asking for log in info would be crossing the line.
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