Social media has a bigger presence than ever before: in our homes, schools, and, most frequently used, in our pockets in the form of our cellphones. With the rise of electronic sharing and openness in our community, why should potential employers or college admission officers think twice about browsing the internet in search of information on potential candidates? The truth is… they shouldn’t. Many candidates for jobs and college scholarships or grants are users of social media sites such as Facebook, which users collectively spend over 10 billions minutes on daily (Source C). A large majority of the content posted to social media is for entertainment and comical purposes only, without a second thought as to whether or not their future …show more content…
“Eighty-Eight percent of admission offices believe social media were either ‘somewhat’ or ‘very’ important to their future recruitment efforts (Source B).” Universities as a whole do not believe that social media investigations should replace face to face communications, but rather show who the candidate is outside of work or school. Another way that universities or employers justify the use of social media to learn more about the students or employees is the fact that the information is public. Most websites have an option for the user to make his or her profile private, so that a request has to be made to view the profile. With this in mind, the user’s decision whether or not to make his or her profile private is a direct “allowance” for the employer or college admission officer to look into the candidates profile. Many people disagree with this justification, saying that not all people have this in mind when posting to their accounts. In fact, Germany has proposed a bill that will restrict the rights of employers and universities on what kind of information can be used, and how the employers or colleges use the information they find. The specific bill would draw the line at purely entertainment forms of social media, such as Twitter, Facebook etc. The bill would allow for employers to use sites such as LinkedIn and Xing (Source …show more content…
Thirty-eight percent of admission applicants reported that their social media had a negative impact on the outcome of the decision, and twenty-six perfect of applicants to special grants were declined due to social media(Source