If you are looking for a job or at least about to be part of the workforce in the near future, you might as well start cleaning up your online activities right now before its too late as a recent report by CareerBuilder point out that more employers are doing their background check on social networking sites. According to the CareerBuilder survey, around 45% of employers are now using social networking sites to research job candidates to help them decide whether to hire the candidates or not. Last year, the number was only at 22%. Aside from these 45% of employers the survey also showed that 11% more are planning to use social networking sites to do their background check of potential employees. The survey was conducted among 2,600 hiring managers.
And guess which social networking site is consulted more by the respondents? – Facebook of course with 29% users. While LinkedIn and MySpace are used by 26% and 21% of the respondents respectively. Interestingly, only 11 percent of those who participated in the survey use blogs for background check while 7% use Twitter.
Another interesting point made by the survey was the fact that IT and Professional & Business Services companies are the top users of social networking sites when it comes to checking the background of their potential hirees.
So, the next time you post an update on your Facebook account, you might want to stop from posting your rants. Who knows, someday this may backfire on you?
Now, anyone got any tips on how to clean up a messy online background? I think I need some advice.