I have heard – and read – enough about social media to understand I shouldn’t post anything, anywhere, unless I would in fact be willing to share it with the whole world. But share my Facebook password with a recruiter or HR person during a job interview? No thank you.
An Associated Press story picked up by the Boston Globe, among others, details the story of a New York statistician who was taken aback when asked by a job interviewer for his Facebook user name and password.
That particular candidate withdrew his application, saying he didn’t want to work for a company that would ask for such information.
Robert Collins of Baltimore returned to a Maryland Department of Public Safety security job following a leave of absence, and was asked to furnish his Facebook login and password, purportedly to check for “gang affilitiations” he was told.
Then I read a line in this InformationWeek blog saying, “It’s common practice for companies to check out job candidates’ social media presence as part of the vetting process (hence, all those recommendations about not posting compromising photos, inflammatory comments, and the like), but as more and more people utilize Facebook’s privacy controls to lock down their profiles, companies are apparently asking job candidates to give up the keys to their Facebook kingdoms.”
If you read through the preceding paragraph several times you will notice a nuanced leap that the author makes.
Yes, we all know that some basic due diligence of job candidates is being done via social media. Got that. And yes I have duly warned my kids not to put anything on Facebook that they wouldn’t want a future employer to find.
But the blogger contends that because we are all getting more privacy savvy, companies are now asking job candidates to open up their Facebook accounts. Since this last part finished the sentence that begins with it’s common practice…those two thoughts seem kind of linked. Maybe she’s just sayin.’
Now I’m just askin’…my question to all you recruiters and HR pros and staffing agencies and hiring experts…is it even close to common practice? Have you ever done it? Even once? Would you? Why? Why Not?
To me this just feels like a clear invasion of privacy, akin to letting you in my house, snooping through desk drawers, cabinets, examining what I eat, read, and so on.
In the blog I cited they quote Bruce Hurwitz, president and CEO of Hurwitz Strategic Staffing, who says the fact that companies feel they can even ask for this information is a sign that we’re still in an employer’s market. “They think that in this market, they can do whatever they want,” he said. “They don’t need the candidates; the candidates need them. They think they can get away with it.”
“They think that in this market, they can do whatever they want. They don’t need the candidates; the candidates need them. They think they can get away with it.”
If you were asked by an interviewer, what would your response be?
What if a person does decide to give up their FB password (or any social network account access), and in the process exposes friends and relatives to privacy invasion and scrutiny, without their permission or authorization?
I mean you may employers long ago began doing background checks on some candidates, but always with authorization of the person being checked, right?
One commenter to the blog said this is the response a candidate should give when asked for their Facebook login and password.
The correct response is for the candidate to ask the interviewer to reciprocate by giving the candidate a password to the CEO’s email inbox and stored correspondence so that the candidate could check out what kind of character the leadership of the company has. Fair enough?
Now it’s your turn. Let the comments begin.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
I saw this reported earlier today and forwarded a link to the two HR Managers in my office. We are an HR Management company and I asked if our Staffing division could start doing this.
The response was exactly as I expected: Laughter and incredulity.
I have, on several occasions ‘Googled’ candidates for higher level direct placements as a part of the vetting process, but I have not gone so far as to search them out on Facebook. Standard screening such as drug screen, criminal background check, reference checks and skills testing in combination with a good interview have worked really well.
Were I asked for my login information I would probably do as I saw suggested in the comments on the article I read: I would write my login and password down and as I hand it to the interviewer state, “I assume this means I am hired. If you change your mind after accepting this password, it will obviously be because you learned my age, family status, and religious beliefs.”
Probably will not win me the position, but will be worth the horrified look on the interviewers face.
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Thanks for the thoughtful comment Steven. I don’t really know what to make of this. Obviously at least a couple of people have indeed been asked for their login info in an employment interview setting. Is this just the tip of the iceberg, or is there no iceberg in sight? Is the media – and Staffing Talk with my post for that matter – way out in front of this story? I don’t know. That’s one thing I am curious to find out. Hopefully we will get lots of responses, and with them, some sense of how pervasive this is today, and how big of a thing it might be tomorrow.
David,
Thanks for highlighting my quote.
In any case, what I also told the reporter who interviewed me was that I don’t think this is a major story. The original AP article, if I remember correctly, only listed 5 employers, and 4 were police departments.
As I reminded her, it’s similar to when the New York Times reported that companies were not willing to consider the unemployed for positions. A few states proposed laws declaring the unemployed a protected population. Fox News Channel followed up with an investigation. They only found 110 companies on the Internet (out of what, tens or hundreds of thousands?) advertising vacancies for which “unemployed need not apply.” The story then disappeared.
Yesterday I asked my students, about 30, if any of them would provide their login names and passwords to a prospective employer. They looked at me like I was crazy.
To be perfectly honest, except as an example of stupidity, I don’t understand why this story has lasted this long.
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Hi Bruce,
Thanks for the comment and the update. As I have alluded to a couple of times, I am fully aware that my retelling of this story is part of a process that is giving the whole thing longer legs than it probably deserves, for the moment anyway.
Your point is well taken that this is not (yet anyway) a pervasive thing, and for the moment is probably isolated in its occurrences.
But that doesn’t mean it will stay that way, and in fact, employers reading these stories might actually get the idea it’s a good idea.
I was at least as interested though in the broader story, and that is an ongoing debate about Internet and social media privacy and security.
And that certainly is an issue that is not only not going away, but will get bigger and more important and demand our attention and perhaps new thoughts and new policies.
Thanks again for weighing in on this.
I never thought this practice had much chance of becoming commonplace, but I appreciate and value the dialogue it has created. I’m of the mindset that as technology continues to develop and new applications for that technology come about, it is often the public forum which decides what is acceptable.
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Why does everyone think this is so crazy? When you submit to a drug screen you are giving your DNA and everything about your body to the employer for evaluation. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like you guys think THAT is LESS invasive than giving your Facebook password.
It’s coming. Don’t laugh it off.
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Gerald,
With respect, you are wrong. You are not giving your DNA to the employer. You are giving your DNA to a certified lab which then disposes of it. The only thing the employer gets is the results of the test.
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Maybe. There has been an occasion where I gave a urine sample directly to a staffer, she sealed it and said she was going to take it to the lab. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. How do I know what they do with it?
All I’m saying is this isn’t that far fetched.
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Ok, we have now heard from Facebook with an official statement on this subject. Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, posted the following statement on the social network’s website.
“In recent months, we’ve seen a distressing increase in reports of employers or others seeking to gain inappropriate access to people’s Facebook profiles or private information. This practice undermines the privacy expectations and the security of both the user and the user’s friends. It also potentially exposes the employer who seeks this access to unanticipated legal liability.
The most alarming of these practices is the reported incidences of employers asking prospective or actual employees to reveal their passwords. If you are a Facebook user, you should never have to share your password, let anyone access your account, or do anything that might jeopardize the security of your account or violate the privacy of your friends. We have worked really hard at Facebook to give you the tools to control who sees your information.”
Apparently two senators were troubled by these requests for passwords, isolated or widespread as those instances may be. Senators Chuck Schumer of New York and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut are asking Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate whether this practice is a violation of federal law. More to come I’m sure.