[Livia]

Originally Posted by Jack_

First of all I want to make a distinction between those with a publicly open Facebook profile and those with privacy settings turned on. Whilst I still don't agree with using people's personal lives as means of picking a suitable employee for those with publicly open profiles, I have much less sympathy than those who have private profiles yet somehow still end up feeling the repercussions of what should be their personal free leisure time. This does happen I believe, I'm sure I have read and heard stories of highly trained IT professionals being employed by companies and universities to bypass security settings on social networking sites in order to spy on potential candidates/existing workers. That, as far as I'm concerned, is totally out of order.

I also don't agree with this supposed correlation between going out and getting paralytic and being unreliable or unsuitable for work. Plenty of people are more than capable of turning up Monday to Friday, working 9 until 5 to the best of their abilities and to the satisfaction of their employers, and then going out on the town on Friday night getting absolutely wasted and off their face, before returning to work on Monday right as reign as if nothing has happened. This assumption (and that's all it is) by employers, and indeed anyone else who believes so, that having wild nights out on the tiles in people's leisure time, that they are entitled to spend as they wish, means that they won't be suitable for a job is just insulting.

If people are slogging it all week, they deserve a break, and are perfectly entitled to spend that break as they wish. I do not see how it is the business of anyone else but their own, so long as they still perform well day-to-day in their job. They also deserve not to be judged on, or have assumptions made from actions which are totally of no relevance to their bosses.

I take it from all you've said that you're not actually an employer, and haven't been for that many job interviews recently.

I don't know anything about getting people to hack into accounts to get information. That's not what we're discussing here and it is, as far as I know, illegal.

It's an employers market. If an employer has to choose between a load of applicants then those applicants will be judged on a whole host of things: what they wear, what they say, their personal grooming, how they present themselves, how they sit in the in interview, eye contact, what's on their CV... and what's publicly available to view on their Facebook page.

If you were going to pay someone to work for you, I think you'd probably want to employ someone who is most likely to turn up on Monday morning and not have the rest of the staff pick up the slack when they're inevitably too hung over to come to work. That would be my assumption if there were lots of drunken pictures and silly comments available for the whole world to access. If you're going to demand freedom of speech, don't expect not to be judged on it.