[defunctirl]

We recently had a presentation at my University from a number of local industry leaders, and the topic of Social Media's role in the hiring process came up. I've been in the process of slowly reducing and removing social media where possible, and the reaction I got to a question regarding an individual's lack of a social media presence was quite negative. Basically the consensus was that if, during the hiring process, the managers / recruiters / HR were unable to find social media accounts (or found highly private / restricted accounts) for the applicant then they would view this as an immediate red flag and indicated that they have previously dropped candidates from consideration purely for this reason. I could have imagined this happening in isolated cases but I was surprised to hear it from 2-3 of the presenters, none of which had any relation to one another.

The irony of this whole situation being that the reason they scan applicants social media in the first place was to look for red flags in the applicants behavior outside of the work place and/or to find reasons they shouldn't be considered for employment.

Kind of ridiculous.

[nether]

What kinds of companies were these? In many industries you'd seriously compromise your hiring if you ruled out all the experienced 40+ year old candidates who don't care for FB accounts. Mechanical engineering and defense work especially.

[defunctirl]

There isn't a whole lot of dev. work or innovation going on in the private sector where I live. This was local Government and a couple of Software Development Consultancies (who primarily contract with local Govt.).

They did give the impression that the suspicion when finding no internet presence was generally when vetting younger graduates.. ie. Millenials, and those who they felt were more likely 'trying to hide something' by not using social media..