Social Networking + Job Opportunities

1. Social Networking + Job Opportunities Students around the world are always told to be careful what they post on the internet. Mainly, this is because companies these days are carefully searching the backgrounds of people who apply for jobs at these certain places.

2. - This hasn’t always been the case. But with the surge of facebook, twitter and also youtube it has become much more evident in the past 5 years. • These 3 main websites make it so easy for people to find “dirt” on you and you definitely have to be careful about what you are posting on the internet. • Companies now hire people full time and all their job consists of is checking the internet to see if the person applying is clean. • In an Article by John Callegari of the Long Island Business News, Lawyer Andrew Kilmer goes into more depth about the effects of Social Networking and the working class.

3. Statistics • The following statistics show that almost half of Employers now use Social Network sites to help with picking future employees. • As Andrew Kimler, a partner with the law firm Vishnick McGovern Milizio says, “Forty-five percent of employers use social networking sites to screen prospective applicants and Thirty-five percent of employers decided not to tender an offer of employment to an applicant based upon what they see on these sites. • He continues to say, “Another 30 percent of employers confirmed they regularly monitor these sites in terms of current employees, so this is a very active area, obviously.”

4. Is this Illegal? • Under New York state labor laws, employers cannot discriminate against current or prospective employees based on recreational, lawful activities undertaken outside of the workplace. • There are a few questions that are illegal to ask of job applicants, such as age, race, gender, religious views and sexual orientation and now with Particularly Facebook, these questions can be easily answered by easily looking at the applicants Facebook page. • Andrew Kilmer says that with this new technology and the past laws it can lead to potential discrimination lawsuits against the Company.

5. I feel like with these laws it would be hard to prove anything because with these Social Network sites like youtube and facebook people know that once you post your pictures and videos and pretty much anything on your profile then it’s going to be on the internet forever. • Most people are old enough to know this about the internet and also they are very aware of the privacy settings these Networking Sites have so there’s no way it could be held up in court.

6. An example of somebody using facebook for their business is Hicksville-based Kozy Shack and the Human Resource director, Tim Sullivan. • His idea was to use social networking within his organization as an opportunity to advance his business. • For the most part, Sullivan says the company uses social networking for things such as brand awareness and employee relations, and a big part is with employee recruitment. • Later on he states, "Using social networking is not the future of recruitment, it's happening right now," Sullivan said. "You've got to use social networks to stay competitive in this market. And it's not just the younger demographic that's involved with this. Statistics show that most of the users of Facebook are middle-aged."

7. There are a few other areas other than recruitment that employers should be worried about that could to legal problems with peoples information being gathered from the internet. • According to Kimler, another problem is gaining unauthorized access to an employee's personal information stored online. • One example he used was when an employee left the password to his e-mail account stored on his work computer. His employer used it to gain access to his personal Hotmail account, and read and printed the e-mails. The employee sued, and the judge ruled in his favor, stating that personal information in storage on the Internet was protected by the Stored Communications Act. • The judges main reasoning was: Carelessness does not equal consent. The Stored Communication Act prevents someone from accessing electronic communication without authorization while it is still in storage. The law has always been such that personal information and content on the Internet could not be submitted as evidence by another party," Kimler said.

8. Kimler ends with talking about ways for employers to protect themselves and their businesses. "Having an employee sign an understanding of what the company's boundaries of privacy are related to information stored on the Internet greatly reduces the chances of abusing the privileges of web access." • If an employee knows about the Company’s access on the internet then he will be much more careful about what he’s doing in public where people could snap a quick photo and put his career at risk. Also be much more aware of what he himself would be posting on say his facebook profile. • Kozy Shack fits this perfectly because as Sullivan says, “It has an extensive Internet-use policy."You have to protect your proprietary information.You've got to anticipate those kinds of situations, and write and communicate your policies in a way that ensures that people are on notice, and know what appropriate uses and inappropriate uses are.”

9. Conclusion • Overall, everybody needs to be careful about what they post on the internet. You might just be wanting to show your friends a funny drunk video from the night before but it could end up ruining your professional career and could end up losing an opportunity for a good job. • Companies can run into problems with the security issues with the Stored Communications Act, But the problem with privacy issues on the internet is that mostly all of the Social Networking sites make it really easy for people to find stuff about you because you personally put all this information on your “Profiles” that basically everyone can see.

10. Citations