I just saw this article about the experience of someone in the job hunting process.
Apparently during the interview the interviewer googled the candidate and found out that his Facebook profile was locked unless someone was friends with the candidate.
As it should be!!!
So the interviewer asked the candidate to provide his login credentials so that the interviewer could check out the whole Facebook profile.
When I read that I thought to myself that we had truly come a long way – isn’t this the same as asking someone to bring their personal diary into an interview – along with the little golden key to open it?
In my opinion this is a reason to walk out of this interview immediately – which is exactly what the candidate did! Thankfully he didn’t seem to need that particular job badly enough.
The article then proceeds to talk about how HR managers and other hiring managers asking applicants to friend them on Facebook. While I see this practice as almost as bad at least there are means to restrict what these people are seeing. If that happened to me I would decline stating that I’m only connected with people that I am actually friends with. Everyone else can connect with me on LinkedIn. If I indeed needed the job badly enough I would friend that person – but set their permissions to basically zero. No access to photos, no access to my private Wall posts, etc. All they would see are my public wall posts – which are few and far between.
I’m really curious where this is going…
