51
NEWS
SEPTEMBER 2013
ACT
Mike Chalmers
reports
that the future of privacy
law is about to go social.
existing ones.
LinkedIn claimed over 5.7 billion
professionally related searches in 2012,
with over 200 million users in over 200
countries. Last year, 52 percent of job
seekers used Facebook to look for work.
And even Twitter joined the craze, with 34
percent of job seekers using its service to
reach out to prospective employers.
While these numbers may not shock
anyone, they indicate a massive shift in
the way we communicate as a society –
and in turn how we will communicate as
professionals across myriad industries.
Within the above percentages, 24 percent
of job seekers admitted that they had been
asked for social media profiles during their
interviews. Interestingly enough, nearly
50 percent of online job seekers reveal that
they use three or more social media sites.
Competition for jobs might be as furious
as it’s ever been. This open access to
so much and so many allows for more
opportunity, but also creates even less
room for error. Tech-savvy jobseekers have
a decided edge over their industry peers
who fail to adapt with the times.
In short, if you’re not using social media
S
ocial media has gradually
become a bridge of connectivity
between almost every age
group, demographic, industry and
endeavor. Networking sites the world
over now represent seemingly any topic
and personality type imaginable. At
no point in history have human beings
had such comprehensive access to one
another – with distance and time merely
an afterthought.
“Global communications” used to stand
for international business relationships –
connections that sometimes took years to
develop and untold efforts to maintain.
The expression now stands for anything
from a group of board members casually
Skyping with an investor halfway around
the world to an elementary school student
secretly texting with a pal in another time
zone.
However, such technological
development, as we realize more often
than not, steadily corners two social
concepts that don’t always play nice with
each other: convenience and responsibility.
The ease at which we now possess the
ability to connect and/or express ourselves
to the world can be quickly diluted by
the reality that such information could
compromise our hopes and dreams
– mostly through interpretation. The
practicality of this digital age cannot
be overlooked, but neither can the
potential hazards.
Subheading
The bombardment of digital
networking applications and their
ever-evolving host platforms, aka
gadgetry, consistently blurs the lines
that theoretically stand between
our personal and professional lives.
And perhaps nothing showcases this
trend more than jobseekers using
social media to look for employment
and employers using it to research
potential employees, or “deal with”
The practicality of the digital age
cannot be overlooked, but
neither can the potential
hazards.
to either look for a job, or look for an
employee, you’re likely falling behind. But
back to that room for error. It becomes
vital that an individual’s online presence
is not only professional, but also free of
any indications that he or she might in any
way be a risky investment for a potential
employer. And the list of dos and don’ts is
probably as wide and vast as the landscape
in which these personal profiles exist.
Social media monitoring service Reppler
recently released statistics that raise some
compelling questions. They discovered
that jobseekers have been turned away by
69 percent of prospective employers or
recruiters as a result of content found on
the individual’s social networking profile
and his or her online affiliations. But
they also found that a near equal amount
have been hired (68 percent) for the same
reason.
First, how much is legal? Can employers
access anyone’s social media profile,
even if it’s password-protected, or follow
them across multiple social media sites
similarly? And can they use whatever
information they find there to determine
whether or not to hire, or fire, someone?
Getting
connected
