Potential Employers Part of Your Social Network

Careerbuilder.com did a survey of hiring managers and found that 22% check a potential employee's social networking sites prior to hiring that person. That is double the amount that responded they checked those sites just two years ago. 

Although my guess (it would be interesting to do a study) is that a smaller percentage of schools are checking those pages prior to hiring teachers, assuredly an increasing percentage are. I would fully recommend that employers do find out all the public information about potential employees available online prior to hiring them. Of potential new teachers on the market these days, I would guess that somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of new pre-service teachers have social networking sites just from informal surveys I did of my pre-service teachers at Indiana University. So, there is a wealth of information available there that potential employees have chosen to make public. 

Now, if you are a new teacher on the job market, I would just get rid of it for the time being. I know there are private options and you can clean up your site and make it respectable, but there is just too much unprofessional stuff on those pages to make me feel comfortable recommending you keep it. One of the biggest issues are other people leaving messages for you that are seen on your page. While you can most certainly control the content you put on your site, it is much more difficult to control the content others post to your site, such as their pictures which show up as "friends." For instance, on my wife's Facebook page, people frequently "hug" her or "poke" her and other silliness. A good friend of mine is a pastor, so I thought if anyone should have a clean Facebook page, it would be him. Sure enough, some of his "friends" were holding beer bottles and posing in not so flattering positions. That is not what you want potential employers seeing because the people making those hiring decisions are not going to be familiar with the norms of the social networking world and are going to see these as oddities and reasons not to hire you. I hate recommending that, but that is how it is for the time being. Feel free to disagree in the comments.

Either way, in the courtship that occurs between potential employers and employees, social networking sites are increasingly part of the scene so both sides need to figure out how to use them to their advantage.