A picture is worth a thousand curses ““ especially one from Facebook that shuts you out of your dream job.
While you’re posting up oh-so-innocent pictures of that party last Friday, your future employer ““ with whom you just had an interview ““ may be snooping around Facebook only to stumble upon your profile.
According to MSN, 23 percent of employers refer to social networking sites to screen applicants. A University of Massachusetts Dartmouth study confirms that admissions officers in 21 percent of 435 colleges in the study also use the same tactics, a recent case being prestigious Brown University.
But, unfortunately, their efforts navigating Facebook are a waste of time because Internet profiles are simply unreliable and ineffective tools for assessing a person’s character or disposition. It’s common sense that Internet profiles can truthfully communicate only so much about a person; after all, why else would we be so skeptical of online dating?
Some claim that checking profiles can help reveal the “true” character of applicants not told from the applications, resumes, or interviews. In some cases, that may be true ““ but in most, hardly.
First of all, an Internet profile is only a self-conceived portrayal of oneself, using selective information, that is far from a true representation.
Secondly, there is room for misinterpretation because such things as sarcasm and other elusive forms of expression are not always transparent through words on a screen, as well as because of the limited amount of information present.
For example, let’s say that a person is tagged by his friend in a bunch of photos of him drinking, and that these are the only photos in which he is tagged. But those are from the only two parties that he has attended the entire year and, in each occasion, he has only drunk moderately, in controlled amounts.
But since these are the only photos of him posted, we most easily judge him as a party animal or a drunkard. Or even a friend might hack into your account as a joke and write up an incriminating profile that makes you seem like an obscene doofus (which has happened to me, as well as to my own victims).
Aside from these reasons to reject social networking sites as character-revealing tools, I have to wonder: Why can’t we just have Facebook for its own sake? If it was created for fun, why can’t it stay that way?
Perhaps the real question here is: To what extent does individual responsibility exist on the Internet, and especially on Facebook, which we previously took for granted as a safe haven for posting college antics?
But social networking sites are businesses, after all, with business interests, leading to such recent moves as allowing profiles to appear in public search-engine results .
As such, using social networking sites does require using common sense and being knowledgeable about the changing privacy measures of these sites.
But that still doesn’t change the fact that employers and admissions officers are looking in the wrong places. Whether used with common sense or not, users know that no one will, or should, digest this information seriously, nor do they sign up to reveal who they are in any significant way.
And employers and admissions officers digging through profiles to further “get to know” their applicants will seldom find it this way ““ and maybe even lose a potentially valuable candidate because of a slight misinterpretation of some silly, insignificant information.
One of the most important and painful things I’ve learned in research is that just because information is available doesn’t mean it’s valuable or worthy.
Though it may be tempting for employers and admissions officers to look at social networking profiles, given the sheer number of people using them these days and due to their easy accessibility, they are a resource that nonetheless proves worthless.
When researching candidates, there’s no doubt that Facebook profiles are only filler information, otherwise known by our favorite word to describe the irrelevant information in a research paper: fluff.
If you’re holding a red plastic cup in your Facebook picture, e-mail Yoo at jyoo@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.