When a small consulting company in Chicago was looking to hire a summer intern this month, the company’s president went online to check on a promising candidate.
MUMBAI/NEW YORK: When a small consulting company in Chicago was looking to hire a summer intern this month, the company’s president went online to check on a promising candidate.
At Facebook, a popular social networking site, he found the candidate’s webpage with this description of his interests: “smokin’ blunts (cigars stuffed with marijuana), shooting people, and obsessive sex.”
It did not matter that the student was clearly posturing. He was done for. “A lot of it makes me think, what kind of judgment does this person have?” said the company’s president, Brad Karsh.
Many companies have been using search engines like Google and Yahoo for background checks on job applicants. And now, career experts say, some recruiters are looking up applicants on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, and Friendster, where students often post risqué photographs and comments about drinking, drug use, and sexual exploits.
Viewed by corporate recruiters, such pages can mean loss of job opportunities.
“Lots of employers Google,” said Michael Sciola, a counsellor at Wesleyan University, Connecticut. “Now they’ve taken the next step.”
This trend is not just prevalent in the West. Employers in India too make no bones about running an online background check on prospective employees.
Ashwin Shroff, chairman and MD of Excel Industries, sees it as another way of getting a reference. “It is the safe thing to do before hiring,” he said. “The idea is to ensure that we are hiring the right person.”
Deepak Ghaisas, chairman of I-Flex Solutions, agreed: “Blogs are written by people for public consumption. They are a good psychology test of the candidate. Around two to three articles in the blog subscribing to a particular trend/behaviour should be noticed.”
For Mahesh Murthy, CEO of Pinstorm, checking employees’ blogs is a routine, both before and after hiring them. “Of my 50 employees, 10 have their own blogs which I regularly read. When I found two of them fighting through blogs I stepped in to make peace,” he said.
What if a blog is opened in a person’s name without their knowing? “There will be mischief-mongers,” said Ghaisas. “In such cases, the candidate has to be asked upfront.”
With inputs from NYT
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