A topic growing in controversy is that of how freely employees can express themselves on social media at the risk of losing their job or not being hired at all.

A Wall Street Journal Blog post reports that the majority of business executives believe that they have the right to know what their employees are doing on social-networking sites. A Deloitte survey found that of 500 respondents with managerial job titles, 60% shared this sentiment.

What bollocks!

Why not hack into your employees’ personal e-mail accounts and listen in to conversations had during a lunch break? Social media exploded into the online scene because it allowed individual expression. With so much policing and control already limiting freedom of expression, it appears that companies now wish to put the cuffs on social media!

If Facebook and MySpace are now to become another tool through which to positively promote your company’s brand while leaving your ‘personal brand’ dry and regimented, why bother?

That is not to say that the public slander of one’s boss or company should be tolerated. On the contrary, if someone does not possess enough tact to understand the consequences of publicly displaying dissatisfaction with one’s boss, perhaps it is time to change bosses or in this case, employees.

What should not become the status quo is a monitoring of employees through Facebook or other social media platforms. It has an eerie ‘Big Brother’ ring to it (not in the TV show sense, but rather as per Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four).

A recent post on Mashable “Do you pass the social media recruitment test” attempts to develop a case for utilising a candidate’s social media footprint to determine their eligibility for the applied role.

The post asserts that if you do not have an expanded and publicly available ‘social media footprint’ you are at a serious disadvantage in the recruitment process to other, more candid candidates.

It recommends the creation of fully updated LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter profiles and to “shed your preconceived notions of keeping your work and home life separate”.

Does an employer need to know your Facebook status or see a myriad of personal photos in order to ascertain that you are a well-rounded individual?
But most importantly, why is it even relevant? In this social media age, have people lost the right to keep a personal life, well, personal? Are these the types of demands that employers can make of employees in 2009?

Often, employers do not even provide the name or position of the recruiter who will be reviewing your job application. A slight disequilibrium in information sharing, perhaps?

Pushing the Privacy Barrier
“…a person’s social media footprint gives employers (and others) the best insight into your passions, interests, communication styles, work habits, work/life balance and all sorts of other valuable information.”

With your complete profile on each social media platform, you will be publicly sharing the following information:

On LinkedIn:
- Your full work history, including dates, locations and specific roles held
- Your picture
- Your interests, hobbies and other information related to your life outside of work
- Participation and involvement in non-paid projects related to your field (open-source, community, volunteer, conference)
- Membership of groups pertaining to your respective field

On Facebook:
- A complete list of your friends and an insight into your respective relationships
- Any personal information you care to divulge such as date and place of birth, marital status, interests, political and religious statuses, personal contact details, academic and work histories
- Pictures posted of you, family & friends from a range of events outside your work life
- Lists of the groups of which you are a member

On Twitter:
- With the goal of developing the biggest network you develop a healthy ratio of followers vs. following, perhaps by setting up auto follow, thus diluting quality with quantity
- You Tweet at least 2-10 a day and maintain a healthy balance between personal and professional tweets

On Your Blog:
- Glimpses into your life outside of work – family, friends, hobbies. This may be a problem if your blog is purely professional
- You include a link to your current resume

When Googled:
- Other than leading to your online blog, webpage or social media profiles, should you possess a name that repeats itself in the World Wide Web, remain hopeful that this link does not lead to potentially discriminating information that is not even about you.

Through your social media footprint, you have given employers (and others) an invaluable insight into your life, both historically and even with event-by-event real-time accounts.  Who could use this information? What is their motivation? How will it affect you, your reputation and your personal security?

Too much Openness
What is worth considering is that through social media you may unwittingly provide an identity thief with the very information they require, in order to commit a crime against you. For example, on Twitter, have you thought about who may be following your posts when you broadcast late on a quiet night that you are leaving an empty office or when you gleefully share that you are just about to head off on a two week trip overseas?

Prior to an over enthusiastic launch into social media, consider the risks and use the mediums responsibly. Read posts like this one from Mashable: 25+ Ways to Manage your Social Identity. Do your due diligence, consider why there is an ever increasing number of posts and articles that site the risks of social media:

- Social Media Sites Risk Growing Threats and Attacks
- The Unexpected Dangers of Social Media
- Are we Walking a Fine Line with all this Openness?

“Don’t wanna be a Social Media Rockstar?”
Beyond the oversight and naïvety of posting every iota of your personal history online and sketching out your daily life in microscopic detail on social media, the necessity of doing so, in order to be ‘recruitable’, is questionable.

The simple act of creating an eligibility criterion based on a candidate’s “social media footprint” inadvertently places those who are of a more private disposition at an immediate disadvantage.

Perchance, it is to your advantage, if a company that employs these hiring practices, does not hire you. Perhaps a better fit would be at a company that focuses on your accomplishments, the value of your potential offering and uses the interview process to determine whether you are a well-rounded individual who will fit into their corporate culture.