More ways for employers to poke around
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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The precarious job market has hit one online employment site hard, although another is branching out with new data on hiring trends. All the same, what value your formal CV when Facebook has just made it so much easier for bosses to dig the dirt?

First the good news – in the United States, the job search engine SimplyHired has just launched an interactive interface allowing jobseekers to keep track of hiring trends in real time. Based on SimplyHired’s own database of 5 million job postings, supplemented by data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and ADP National Employment reports, it allows users to see how competitive the job market is in their area and which companies are hiring.

It wasn’t that long ago that we were hearing speculation that online and crowdsourced recruitment services like SimplyHired or its competitor Monster might be poised to start ousting traditional agencies. But now Monster itself is in difficulties, with a decline in revenue and bookings in the fourth quarter and plans to shed 400 of its own employees to “align expense levels to current market conditions”.

Monster does seem reasonably upbeat about the future of its own value-added products though, including its Power Résumé Search and BeKnown, its professional networking application for Facebook users (earlier LiveWire comment here). But now Facebook is pursuing its own programme to lay out people’s life stories for employers to peruse – good and bad.

Facebook’s Timeline pulls all your activities together into a single chronology, so anyone can see what you got up to each year. It originally launched Timeline towards the end of 2011 – but now it likes it so much that it’s rolling it out to everybody.

Already commentators are sounding alarm bells – directed particularly towards jobseekers. Employment lawyer Philip Landau lays it on the line in an article for the Guardian: how can you know what subjective interpretation a prospective employer may put on your Facebook antics?

In a briefing to the media, the law firm Thomas Eggar also advises people to make the most of the seven day preview period before their Timeline goes live. The firm doesn’t encourage employers to go fishing on Facebook – but realistically, there’s nothing to stop them.

For entirely understandable reasons of personal security, women are less likely than men to share contact details online, according to a recent infographic from research panel specialist uSamp. But well over half of both men and women will disclose their occupation, and a majority are willing to share personal photos.

But surely it’s LinkedIn, not Facebook, that employers should be looking at if they want relevant background on prospective employees. Maybe it should – but, as LiveWire has previously noted, it isn’t.

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