Candidates and social media: Look, don't touch, and don't disclose!

27 May 2010 4:09pm

Employers can and will use social media to assess candidates, says a workplace law expert, but if a company decides not to hire someone based on information from an online profile, it's common sense not to tell this to the applicant.

Nicholas Duggal, special counsel on employment and industrial relations for TressCox Layers, told the Australasian Talent Conference that employers and recruiters were using social media websites every day to find out more about individual job seekers.

Duggal noted that in the current privacy guidelines for social media users, the Australian Privacy Commission acknowledged that: "potential employers could look at [a candidate's] MySpace or Facebook page and perhaps base their decisions on what they see there".

The Commission goes on to warn social media users: "You have probably seen some of those media reports where people have applied for a job and found that their MySpace or Facebook page has let them down... So, think carefully about what information you publish about yourself."

Duggal said the Commissioner's statements suggested it was "permissible" for prospective employers and recruiters to make judgments about candidates based on what they saw on a social networking site, but he noted that any large organisation that collected and stored personal information would then be required to tell the candidate they had collected it, and explain how they had used it.

For this reason, he said, it was wise for potential employers to apply a "look, but don't touch" policy to personal information found through social media.

In any case, Duggal said, in an instance where an employer had come across some unfavourable information about a candidate online, the simple and obvious route to avoiding any kind of legal action was to stick with a customary rejection letter.

"I'd be using a standardised line - 'On this particular occasion we didn't feel that you fully met our criteria'. (And it had nothing to do with you being in a state of undress in your Facebook profile photo.) To me that's just common sense."

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