Jim Durbin has a great post up about the way putting your life online changes expectations between employers and employees.
I pondered posting a comment to Jim’s site, but my thoughts on it got kind of complicated so I decided it deserved a blog post of its own. I think there are several key points everyone needs to calm down and think about before freaking out about someone’s MySpace page, or the employer’s use thereof.
Employers need to recognize that this kind of behavior (college student binge drinking, bitching about your job offer, whatever) has always gone on; it went on with their previous hires, and the only difference here is that they found out about it specifically. If you hire a lot of college students, some percentage of them will have engaged in stupid, juvenile, even dangerous or illegal behavior while in school. Just because you didn’t find it on Facebook doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. So if you’re comfortable with the kids you didn’t find out about, you need to get comfortable with the ones you did.
And Jim makes an excellent point that ought to be put on a banner across the top of every MySpace or FaceBook page. Do YOU, Mr. Hiring Manager, want to be judged on the stupid stuff you did in school? I didn’t think so. The kid with the 3.8 average who interviews well does so because he’s a smart kid with good interpersonal skills. People grow up. So will your employees, and if you’re concerned about their behavior at the company Christmas party, that’s the trade-off for hiring cheap entry-level employees. If the bar crawls aren’t affecting the quality of work being produced, they really aren’t relevant to the quality of the employee.
Gen Y employees, on the other hand, need to understand that the inherent conflict between desiring privacy and putting all your bad behavior out there for the world to see. Yes, maybe you put it up there for your friends to find, but they aren’t the only ones with access to the internet. Grow up and learn to be more cautious about what you put up there, or learn to live with the consequences. Employers check up on candidates to find out what kind of people they are. That’s how the world works, and it’s not going to change just because you don’t like it. As someone who has been putting her life online for years now, I am particularly unsympathetic to employees who cry about privacy violations when they’re the ones broadcasting their misadventures to anyone with an Internet connection. Learn to set some boundaries- the whole world doesn’t need to know about the particularly excellent weed you smoked last weekend.
Finally, for the sake of all that is right and good, develop a sensible, flexible policy about employee web sites. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect that employees not air your company’s dirty laundry on the Internet. It’s very sensible to ask that they not discuss their coworkers in such a way that could upset the team dynamic in your office. You can require your employees to respect your company’s brand on the Internet and not use your name or trademarks in such a way that could damage that brand. But beyond that, you’re starting to intrude into how an employee chooses to socialize (socializing online is still socializing) and that’s not a good way to develop a trusting relationship with your staff.
Well put Tiffany – I think you have it down – I can’t imagine I would have held any job in my twenties if the possibility existed that employers were tracking my whereabouts as posted by my friends.
Or even when I first started this blogging thing. Politics, personal life, raunchy humor – yeah, I would have been fired for sure.
Excellent, Social marketing is an adaptable approach, increasingly being used to achieve and sustain behaviour goals on a range of social issues, it is a very good post .
Cheers,
Andy Colleman