This chart is fucking chilling:
What does ‘demonstrated poor communication skills’ mean in reference to your Facebook page, exactly? And have 9% of employers really rejected candidates because they drink? Drinking is not only perfectly legal, but basically universal in Western societies. Do companies only want to hire teetotalers?
It’s understandable, of course, that employers want to find out all the information they can about prospective employees. And there’s no feasible way to prevent employers from looking at publicly-available information on candidates. I’m more concerned about the snobbishness displayed in these categories.
Just because somebody drinks on weekends or posts animated GIFs on weekdays doesn’t mean they’re incapable of being productive, professional employees. Feeling like our personal opinions and evening activities are being monitored by future employers just gives us another disincentive us from being ourselves in public.
We can’t stop employers from judging job candidates on their social media content. But we can ask them to use the right criteria.
> And have 9% of employers really rejected candidates because they drink? Drinking is not only perfectly legal, but basically universal in Western societies. Do companies only want to hire teetotalers?
Everything becomes a CYA endeavor when you work for a large company – everything is a battle to do the least objectionable thing.
If an employee comes in drunk, or doesn’t show up because he’s hung over, or crashes his car because he was driving drunk, a higher up can directly challenge a hiring manager – “You *knew* he was a drinker, why did you hire such an obvious liability?”
Unrelated: when I try to log in with Twitter, WordPress wants the authority to tweet under my account. What the fuck: no.