Employers increasingly examine online identities

The simple Google search was enough to turn up one job candidate's recent criminal background, one that was significant enough to even get mentions in the press.

"He was a candidate for a pretty important position, and he was actually very promising," recalls Tomáš Prajzler, a managing partner at the Talentor recruitment agency offices in Prague. Online searches can turn up "some really weird things," he added.

Google searches are standard practice for recruiters and simple enough that most employers will probably use them when screening candidates. But as people document a growing share of their lives online, businesses are taking note and using whatever information is available to make hiring decisions, as well as taking measures to protect and manage their own brands.

Local recruiters say corporate clients are for now stopping short of perusing someone's Facebook albums or Twitter accounts, but that sort of in-depth search is becoming quite common in the United States, says Prajzler, who has taken recruitment training courses on the other side of the Atlantic.

"I know overseas this research goes much more into detail compared with what we do. And people are much more aware that once you put anything on the Web, it stays there, even if you try to delete something. It's trackable," he said.

Forty-five percent of U.S. recruiters planned to use social network sites like Facebook and Twitter to search for candidates for job openings in 2010, according to a report by the JCSI recruitment consultant firm that surveyed 100 HR and recruitment companies at the end of 2009. The survey didn't specify whether headhunters were searching out personal information of candidates who had already applied for an opening, but the takeaway was this: Potential job offers may hinge on how impressive your Facebook profile is.

Professionally oriented sites such as LinkedIn are being used in the Czech Republic more as a way to source potential candidates, and references are still being checked the "old-fashioned way," by calling former employers, says Darcie Murray from the Prague offices of Pedersen and Partners recruitment firm. Internet research is also used to check out professional associations, press mentions or publications to match up with information gleaned from interviews. In her experience, companies have never asked her to perform searches on the more social sites such as Facebook.

"I think it definitely crosses a lot of different lines if people start referencing things you found on someone's Facebook page," she said. "Obviously, if you put my name into a search engine, you can see I have a Facebook profile. But at the same time, people have control over whom they allow to see these things."

Facebook allows users to maintain varying privacy levels, although those controls haven't been without fault or bumps along the way. It's the more innocuous online footprints that can come back and haunt the otherwise savvy Internet user, says Ondřej Rak, who has a Ph.D. in cultural studies and is an account manager at ImageLab, an HR consultancy company in Prague.

Hypothetically, a candidate could be turned down for a position at BP 10 years down the road for attaching their name to an online boycott of the company in 2010, he said.

"Let's say you work at a company and you criticize your competitor online. What happens if those two companies merge in the future or join a bigger holding company?" he said.

Rak admits imagining every possible scenario is "quite demanding" but says the bottom line is to keep consequences in mind.

It's a refrain that's been picked up by the European Commission (EC), which has launched an information campaign called "Think before you post!" aimed at adolescents and young adults who have grown up in an Internet age in which oversharing has become the norm. The EC's Safer Internet Program, now in its 10th year, has primarily focused on safety, but increasingly the message is encouraging adolescents to keep job prospects in mind.

"That future employer may be looking at an innocent teenager moment and wrongfully profile the job applicant," a release stated.

Students and graduates of the University of New York in Prague are for the most part aware of the potential pitfalls presented by social-networking sites, and the university has addressed the issue in Career Office Workshops, said Renáta Micajová, the school's corporate affairs manager.

"I cooperate with many companies and recruiters, and I haven't encountered anyone who would really search a candidate on a social-networking site," she said.

But in the United States, the practice has become so pervasive that countermeasures are available for a fee. ReputationDefender, based in Redwood, California, was founded in 2006 to help individuals and companies to "clean" and improve their online presence. The consultants can help improve Google results and Facebook profiles, as well as erase negative information. The company was recently one of 31 technology companies to be designated a Technology Pioneer for 2011 by the World Economic Forum. ReputationDefender isn't just doing well in the United States; the service has also found a big market in Germany, which trails only the United States and Canada.

"We have customers in 100 countries, and the Czech Republic makes up a portion of our business," said Patty Tredway, a communications manager at ReputationDefender.

While the status quo in the Czech Republic appears to mean recruiters and employers draw the line between personal and professional online identities, it's an ethical issue, rather than a legal distinction, Prajzler said, and the tide could very well shift. Whether more personal searches should become the norm is a "tough question," he added.

"If the client can explain to me why they want me to do it, explain their way of thinking and how they would use the information, then I would think about it. If it's a vague reason, and they want to see what they look like or get into their private life, then I'd have a problem with that."

Claire Compton can be reached at
ccompton@praguepost.com