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Watch your Orkut profile, future boss may be snooping
The Indian Express, September 28, 2008 |
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| An active profile on online social networking sites is a double-edged sword. It could get you a job, or it could prompt headhunters and companies to filter you out on the basis of the personal details on your profile—your friends, communities you’ve joined and public messages (known as scraps) you’ve posted. |
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Companies are now scanning the profiles of candidates on Facebook, Orkut and LinkedIn. Mumbai-headquartered IT firm Tech Mahindra, for instance, reads your scraps on your Orkut profile to get leads on your behaviour. “Some scraps give important insights into the psyche of a candidate,” says L.K. Bhatia, vice-president (resource management group), Tech Mahindra. |
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| The information you put on your CV is crosschecked with your online circle of friends. Ganesh Shermon, Partner & Head of People & Change Advisory Services, KPMG, says, “Some companies create a fake profile, befriend one of the candidate’s school friends and extract information by casual enquiries.” |
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| A Facebook/Orkut profile also gives an idea of the extent of your friendliness—something that can’t be gauged from your CV. For a finance-related position that calls for integrity, a smaller circle of friends is preferred, while for an insurance agent or a public relations executive, the larger the circle, the better |
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| Has any candidate been rejected on the basis of his online social profile? Shermon says an organisation has to be very “flaky” in order to base its decisions on social networking sites alone. A senior HR manager with Kotak Mahindra Bank says, on condition on anonymity, that online checks are cost-effective. “We spend an average of at least Rs 5,000 for checking the background of a candidate. Background checking on social networking sites is free,” he says. |
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| Your blog could get you into trouble too. Ajay Trehan, CEO of screening firm Authbridge Research Services, says a candidate who was almost hired may now get dropped because of a negative comment his ex-wife left on his blog. |
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| Headhunters employ filters while sourcing candidates online. “If a candidate has joined an obscene community or has a friend who’s posing semi-nude, we would drop him,” says Kris Lakshmikanth, CEO, Headhunters India, a third-party vendor. With companies monitoring even the behaviour of current employees on networking sites, people should be careful about what they post online, says Lakshmikanth, who advises that if you must have fun online, it is better to maintain two profiles, one official and another with an alias just for... |
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| Yet, your online social profile could also work to your advantage. “If our client wants 100 recruits in a month and if Naukri.com can provide me only 40, I look up Orkut,” says Priyanka Bhatia, senior HR consultant, Elixir. |
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“We’ve hired five per cent of our employees from these sites since we started using them close to a year ago,” says Tech Mahindra’s L.K. Bhatia. Laksmikanth says about 20 per cent of all the junior-level recruits have been sourced from Orkut this year. “We expect this figure to go up to 50 per cent by 2010,” he says. A recruiting agency for American management consulting company, Accenture, says it targets employees of rival companies like Genpact and PriceWaterHouse Coopers. |
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| While Orkut is the preferred medium for sourcing entry or junior-level professionals, LinkedIn is helpful for hunting down senior-level managers. Candidates sourced from Orkut and LinkedIn are known as “passive candidates” in the industry and are preferred over active candidates. |
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| Isn’t creating a fake profile and scanning the personal information of a candidate an infringement on privacy? “It certainly is. Despite the war for talent, Indians don’t respect job applicants. They think they have a right over them,” says Shermon.... |
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