Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’
In an increasingly competitve job market future employers are looking for individuals who are prepared to go that extra mile to demonstrate their knowledge, expertise or passion for a new role. Social media is one of the many tools that need to be part of any strategy when looking for a new job, but remember it’s not the only one.
It would be odd if we didn’t wrap up the year without some kind of closing piece on what has happened in 2011. So, here’s a video from the team at www.videoinfographs.com – full of facts and figures from the world of social media.
The fourth of a series of six blogs, guest contributor Ann Holman, takes a closer look at the progression of the social media behemoth Facebook. Now the dust has settled for a while let’s keep this simple, I detest complication! It’s not a case of whether Facebook goes for an IPO, it’s just a matter of when. On balance it looks like the company is going to be forced to make the move legally combined with demands being placed on it by its current investors and employees.
In the third of a series of six blogs, guest contributor Ann Holman, takes a closer look at the progression of social media and considers whether social media has turned into something much uglier than expected. Actually it already has got ugly. Subjectivity and how one tells a story and its association with journalistic integrity will continue to overshadow and be overbearing. This recent plethora of conversation, discussion and debate about the super injunction situation in the UK has clearly demonstrated and begun the road to change.
A team of undergrad and postgrad Journalists headed up by John Harrison and Bruce Redman from the The University of Queensland, Department of Journalism, will be blogging from media140 Brisbane, Science communication event.
With more than 583 million members including 60% of US Internet users you could be forgiven for thinking that Facebook didn’t have much further to go before it achieved complete global domination. In Japan it’s a very different story, evidence of a chasm between Eastern and Western sensibilities. Rachel Pictor explores the issue which was reported this month in The New York Times.
In May 2009 Harvard Business Review published a report on the latest social media statistics relating to the gender of users. A survey of 300,542 Twitter users put men at the forefront of this new media. These statistics went against the trends of other popular social networking sites, like MySpace and Facebook that suggested women dominate the social networking sphere.
Web 2.0 has turned the internet into a kind of world. Twitter is a country. Facebook is a much larger country – more similar in size to Russia or the USA. Within the country of Facebook are smaller regions like counties or cities – groups and gaming communities like Farmville. World of Warcraft (admittedly more ‘gaming’ than ‘social’) even looks like a real place with visually realised people and valuable real estate! Just like the real world (and the playground), people make friends and get into fights.
Paul Adams, a senior user experience researcher at Google created an extremely rich and insightful presentation looking at the challenges that real-life social networks bring to web design.
When it comes to reflecting our real life social networks into what could be considered rudimentary online networks, there is a real design challenge in terms representing how your friends, colleagues and associates inter-relate to each other.
Social technologies such as Facebook and Twitter have a homogenised view of friendship; they group everyone together. This typically doesn’t reflect how real friendships are nurtured and naturally creates communication challenges.
For example, not everyone will want to know on a daily basis about your fondness of cats, or wants to know about your regular eating habits.
So next time before you tag your photo’s on Facebook, Flickr or send that Tweet consider who will actually see it and do they need to?
Ten years ago, a human resources manager would have had to hire a private investigators in order to find out what a potential future employee liked to get up to on Friday nights.
However, while Facebook has surely put paid to the careers of dozens of PIs, it may be doing the same to thousands of job-seekers who really have nothing to hide.
There are currently no regulations relating to the use of social sites in employee-profiling, and many employers say they have discounted an applicant based solely on what they saw of him or her online.
There is a distinct difference between the day-to-day lives of many social network users and what they post on their profiles. Is it fair that prospective employers use this to judge applicants, without any context or wider knowledge of the individual?
Alternatively, is the onus on each individual to ensure his or her online identity is not one that may send shivers down the spine of potential bosses?
In a world of ever-decreasing privacy, Jared Woods from SKM asks; how social is too social?
Jared has been working in employment communications for nearly ten years. His passion is helping companies differentiate themselves as workplaces, and use their corporate personality to attract, engage and retain the right kind of talent.
A dyed-in-the-wool technology junkie, Jared believes that when it is used to enhance communities, the result is a strong culture, effective management and commercial benefit.
Jared works for engineering consultancy Sinclair Knight Merz. He is a regular blogger and contributor on forums, events and online education programs.
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There is a lot of talk about how social media affects your employability, and how companies can address employee behaviour online.
Employers are using online searches with increasing regularity to profile candidates, and that can pose a huge risk to job seekers’ career prospects, and even their personal reputations.
A happy and safe middle ground between a healthy interest in the online presence of a potential employee, and delving to the point of being unethical needs to be found.
Here are a few thoughts about how both employers and job candidates can handle the realm between a person’s actual character and their drunken party photographs.
Employers
Employers have a choice. They can either use candidates’ social media presence to review them, or they can eschew it.
The most common and simple method is of course to search for an individual on Facebook. If a candidate’s privacy settings allow it, with one click a potential boss may suddenly find him or herself privy to their relationship status, whether they count their friends in dozens or thousands and what they got up to in Greece last spring.
There is even software – like MaxHire – which actually uncovers every instance your potential employee appears on the Internet, collating their information from a range of websites.
Whether or not you feel comfortable making use of technology in that way is purely subjective. However, just as an aside, 70 per cent of surveyed employers do.
Ethics dictate that you must notify your candidates that this is part of the equation, but currently, you are not legally bound to do so.
Everyone behaves differently under observation, and clandestine voyeurism is out of place in a formal process like hiring.
Some companies explain that they will be conducting a social media audit to see how strong a candidate’s personal online brand is, and whether or not it is in line with the organisation’s values.
Employers should be totally transparent about which specific platforms they will be checking, giving candidates the chance to scan their profiles on the same sites – be they LinkedIn, Twitter or any other – to make sure they have everything covered.
And now, on to the thorny issue of drunken party pictures posted on social media websites. People use social media to share experiences they enjoyed, and these can take any number of forms.
It is rare to find Facebook albums entitled ‘Me reading sensible books in my tracksuit on the couch on weeknights’.
The information people present on social networking sites is skewed towards the most exciting and social content in their lives.
It is vital that hiring managers and employers recognise this so that they can evaluate a person properly. Without context, most information online is at best a guide – it is by no means definitive.
At present, the only an employer’s use of information from social sites is limited only by the personal discretion of the hiring manager.
No official framework exists to regulate the way it is used, and self-published information is not protected in any way by the law.
Candidates
Unfortunately, there is not much choice for candidates but to self-censor their online interaction. A good rule of thumb may be to imagine the worst possible case scenario whenever you post something online.
This essentially means that personal freedom is restricted in what is theoretically a private space. However, the cold hard fact is that nothing is private once it goes online. If you are going to publish your life, be ready for people to use that information, out of context, and in the worst way they possibly can.
There are a few ways in which candidates can reduce their vulnerability to unwanted scrutiny when applying for jobs.
For example:
1. Using an email address that does not link you to online social profiles;
2. Supplying links to the ‘right’ online properties when applying – like LinkedIn, or a professional blog
3. Setting up Google alerts based on your own name, so that you can see how you appear to a casual observer
4. Checking privacy settings and adding disclaimers where possible to demarcate personal information from professional.
None of these methods are foolproof, but they do go a long way toward averting potential cases of mistaken identity and social media faux pas, and to separating professional personal from social personality.
To finish with some perhaps troubling figures, more than 75 per cent of companies surveyed in the US admit that they have scrapped a candidate based on data found on social networks, and more than 50 per cent of those admitted that the process of profiling candidates online was not explained in detail in the terms and conditions presented to applicants.
There is more reading on this topic from some very clever HR people here, here, here and here, and you are invited to share your experiences, thoughts and comments on the message board below.
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