Found this article on the telegraph (click me) that states "Almost half of employers have rejected a potential worker after finding incriminating material on their Facebook pages, research has found."
The article references a website called Career Builder (click me) who have more up to date statistics on just how much employers research prospective candidates. Surprisingly the statistics also mention reasons why employers were more likely to hire someone.
According to a survey ran by Career Builder in 2014, 23 percent of employers "found content that directly led to them hiring a candidate, up from 19 percent" in 2013.
Also found this YouTube video (although a little dated, very relevant to our project) of a CBS interview with Tom Demello, President of Ziggs.com (apparently a website that notifies you when your names has been searched on Google or Yahoo, however they don't have an accessible website so not sure if they're still an active company or not..). He talks about the implications of our 'online footprint' particularly for students who have just graduated.
"I think that some of these sites out there are gonna be the most expensive free websites to their career that they've ever seen."
However, should future employers be allowed take into account information found on social media when making decisions on hiring potential employees? The person we are online may not always be the same person we are in our professional lives. Is it then fair for decisions to be made regarding our professional lives based on our online persona? Some argue that the information that we put out on public social media sites are fair game. However a stupid Facebook status you made at 14 or a picture you were tagged in two years ago from a 'lads holiday' seems hardly fair.
I know that this is just one angle we can take for our project, I was thinking we could also look at stalking/online identity theft as well? I also really like Danni's idea of looking at anonymity online!
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