Greg's Corner

You can now apply to jobs on Facebook, but should you?

Facebook recently added a new feature to their already jam-packed social platform. After you click on the jobs tab then find a job you like you can click on the apply button. Once you do that, some of the information for the application is already filled out with the information you’ve already provided to Facebook. Considering that on a lot of job websites not only do you have to upload your resume, but then you have to retype everything that was already on your resume. So on paper, this sounds like a great idea, but is it really?

Remember, this is Facebook after all, the platform where most people post just about every thought they have and every action that they’ve made. In the news there are constantly stories about people being suspended from their jobs for incendiary posts that they’ve made on Facebook. If employers are even more integrated with your Facebook this could mean that could potentially scour every detail of your personal life that you’ve shared on Facebook. Even if your Facebook is relatively free of controversy, there could be something that a prospective employer could possibly find objectionable, after all hiring managers are human too.

If this becomes a more accepted trend by employers we may all want to consider creating a second Facebook account that we use for professional purposes only. The question is will Facebook allow that since they seem to crackdown on duplicate accounts or any account they find that may be deemed as a ‘fake’ account? If that would be the case then Facebook could lose its appeal since its most coveted feature is that its users feel free to share just about anything on the website.