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How Long Until Someone Loses Their Job?
About eight years ago I applied for a job at one of the largest insurance companies. After a few phone interviews and some testing, I made it to the in-person interview. I showed up in my suit and tie, the portfolio had copes of my resume printed on nice bond, and I met with several executives. After the team interview was over, I met with the HR person. She said that the team liked what I had to say and my vision and she said that the only things left were the drug test and the “Google test”. She then rotated her chair towards her computer, loaded Google into her browser and typed in my name. For the next 10 minutes she browsed links that had my name associated with them and she explained that they like to look into the background of the people they hire.
Lately we’ve read reports about people losing their job or not receiving a job offer because of what they write about on their blog or post on one of the social networks. But what about the new location tools like Foursquare and Gowalla? Could using one of these services be the quickest ticket to a pink slip or a non-offer? While I don’t think that either service will hit the mainstream, no matter how much a certain tech blog pumps Foursquare, no other service shows off everywhere you go like the location-based services do. In fact, on Foursquare and Gowalla you are rewarded for showing off where you go in the form of silly badges, pins and stamps.
If you aren’t familiar with Gowalla and Foursquare, here’s how the services work. You load their mobile applications on your phone and then “report in” at the locations you go to. It’s supposed to be like a fun game – Foursquare issues “badges” and Gowalla issues “pins” and “stamps” each time you reach a certain milestone. You can see the badges that one tech blogger has received to-date below. You can receive badges including the Bender badge which shows that you are out more than 4 nights in a row.
I spent a few minutes looking at various users of Foursquare and some users show hundreds of nights out and thousands of “check-ins”. Cute now, a serious employability issue later?
Jenna Wortham at the NY Times posted the results of a HR study last summer which included lots of information about how employers are using social networks to run online background checks. Included was the following, “the study, which questioned 2,667 managers and human resource workers, found that 35 percent of employers decided not to offer a job to a candidate based on the content uncovered on a social networking site.” Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn were the most popular sites used by employers. Additionally, “44 percent of employers pinpointed references to drinking and drug use as red flags.”
The new location-based services make it so easy for an employer to see where a user goes and their patterns. An employer could easily see that a candidate has been to the same bar every night or multiple bars or parties. Or an employer could see that you have eaten at McDonalds for every meal this week.
Additional food for thought…let’s assume the credit card publishing service Blippy also hits the mainstream. Could Blippy be the next tool for employers to use to perform online background checks. It would be super easy for an employer to see where you are going and how you spend your time outside of the office.
It would be interesting to conduct a study that looks into whether users think about the effects a service might have on their profile before using the service.
What’s your take: will employers begin to extend their online background checks to include the new location-based services?
Wow Allen, I never even thought of this. I don’t see why employers wouldn’t look into things like this. Maybe not yet because things like FourSquare and Gowalla aren’t widely used enough. However, once they become more part of people’s everyday life like Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook have…I don’t see why they wouldn’t. They are going to use whatever is available to them to try and get an idea of what the person is really like.
Great post
Thanks – my goal is always to try to introduce new ideas and potential thoughts.
[...] or Gowalla, the question about how this affects a job search will continue to appear. A recent blog post comes from Allen Stern of CenterNetworks that specifically talks about social location or check-in services. Again, the issue of using [...]
I like craft beer. I like local food joints (not chains). I blog about it. I take photographs of beer, and post online.
I haven’t been drunk in years though, and am rarely out past 9pm.
Looking at my online content, one might think I was a right old boozer I suppose. It’s all BS though, and if you don’t want to employ me because of my personal interests, then i don’t want to work for such a narrow minded idiot anyway!
It could also work to the potential employees advantage. If they looked me up it would show that I work a lot. Spend time with my family, almost never go to bars or talk about getting drunk. There are zero references to drugs on any of my social media platforms and all of the pictures are of my family.
I would look like the model employee.
Whether or not that it true about me, is known only to me, but that’s what they would see, and I would start Monday :)
Or how long before some company is sued for discriminating against a prospective employee for reasons that have nothing to do with their capacity or propensity to perform the job they have applied for?
Don’t think that FourSquare will matter or any other location-based platforms. I have been asked on paper applications within the last 2 years about the social networks that I am a member of.
Will employers include {Foursquare, Gowalla, Blippy} in these background checks? Yes. They will include any service which becomes sufficiently popular for them to take notice of.
Does it matter? No. The particular service is less important than the instinct of the person using it. If you are unwise enough to check in at establishments which will reflect badly on you, you’re also unwise enough to post photos of it to another service and to brag about it on a third.
I’m not sure thats even a bad thing. Reference checking is the best way for an employer to gauge the caliber of the person they are hiring, but reference checking has become less effective as our world has become larger and more mobile. The public Internet serves as a reference of sorts, albeit not a human one.
The cases which do bother me are when an employer or public agency demands prospective employees to friend them or change the privacy settings of accounts to allow arbitrary snooping. People have a right to privacy. My own rule is not to post things online which I don’t want everyone to see (my Facebook account is all pictures of my kids), but that doesn’t mean I willingly give up my privacy. Nobody should.
Great post!
I’d like to create several fake profiles of the people doing the interview. Then when they pull up my Google results, I’d ask if they would be kind enough to show me what theirs look like so I have a good example of what to strive for. Hopefully they will do themselves and come up with lots of drinking and 1/2 naked pics. I still won’t get the job, but it would be nice to see their face when I ask them if they really believe everything the find on the internet.
If an employer didn’t offer me a position (or even revoked a position) based on what I publish on location based social networks like Gowalla and Foursquare, then I don’t think I’d want to work for that company anyways. Sure, you can come up with examples of data sets that would indicate potentially work related problems, such as check-ins at the same bar five nights a week, but in most cases, social check-ins are just going to show a healthy life outside of work, which employers should value, rather than consider as a potential risk.
That said, I agree with Ben’s comment that privacy controls are going to be increasingly important for all social services, not just location based services, as we continue to put more and more of our lives online. Data like what we share with Gowalla and Foursquare can reveal a lot about someone, so it’s important for each user to be able to decide just how open they want to be with that data, since everyone will have different privacy needs, wheter it’s just for a sense of personal privacy, or for work related privacy like that discussed in this article.
Well, that depends on how tightly privacy controls are managed. A lot of these reports that employers didn’t make an offer because of photos they saw on Facebook sounds like BS to me… until a month or so ago you couldn’t look at a person’s profile unless you were friends and even now its still not possible to see the photo album of someone you are not friends with.
(if you friend the recruiter/interviewer then that’s your own fault).
Right now sites like FourSquare and Gowalla have varying degrees of privacy – and this will change over time too. For me it’s kinda obvious that to achieve mainstream these sites need to cater to privacy issues beyond any other social network before – and they will get that right.
What is much more interesting is looking at people’s twitpic/etc uploads + many now have GPS embedded in the EXIF info.
interesting about the GPS info in photos – I’m sure someone will create a service for employers that provides a simple dashboard for lookups of any person. Would be a moneymaker I bet.