Recruiters warned against using social networking sites

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.

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"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.