Employers looking to recruit staff should not rely solely on social networking sites when deciding who to take on.
That is the advice issued by Dan Hawes, co-founder of the Graduate Recruitment Bureau, who suggested that
information stored on sites such as Twitter and Facebook was not that "reliable".
Mr Hawes recommended that recruiters should give prospective candidates the benefit of the doubt by taking into considering their CV and how they perform at interview, as well as their user profile on networking sites.
He explained: "In terms of recruiting using [a social networking site profile] as a deciding factor, that’s pretty short-sighted, at the foremost they should interview someone and make a decision on that and their CV.
"That’s traditional recruitment selection methods; what hobby they do in their spare time isn’t that vital for a particular job," he explained.
Figures released by Nielsen have shown that Twitter.com has grown in popularity among both consumers and the corporate world.
Both Twitter and Facebook now have job pages which can be accessed by recruiters.
Recently my Son had some very bad experiences with Facebook.
Having reported other students for possessing cannabis and having an immitation firearm, he received threats via facebook. These were very extreme and police were actually involved. Having seen this behaviour from these supposedly “intelligent” individuals I would certainly want to know as much as possible about potential recruits. If they are stupid enough to add those sort of things to a social network site then I would have grave doubts about them – beside the fact that they are actually committing a crime which of course would not come to light through a CV.