Abstract
Today, both employees and employers are active online. A lot of people live their lives through personal online social networks. Online social networking sites are an easy tool to screen potential employees online profiles and for human resource management to use in recruitment processes. The screening process includes Internet and social networking site search that will provide not only professional but also personal information. Investigating personal information, however, may be considered violation of privacy. Our study goals are to find out how common it is to do background checks on possible future employees in Estonia, how students feel about such a practice and how they maintain their public profiles. Methods used to gather information were a survey among employees (n=34), pupils (n=117) from five high schools, students (n=91) from one university, and a case study that involved pupils (n=54) and students (n=38). Results reported in this paper will give an overview of our understanding of the accuracy of online profiles, common practices, unspoken risks, and maybe even frustration from the side of future employees. The results of this study can be applied to improve youth-related Internet safety training modules and programmes.
Chapter PDF
References
Clark, L.A., Roberts, S.J.: Employer’s use of social networking sites: A socially irresponsible practice. Journal of Business Ethics 95(4), 507–525 (2010)
Counts, S., Stecher, K.: Self-presentation of personality during online profile creation. In: Proc. AAAI Conf. on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM (2009)
Coutu, D.: We googled you. Harvard Business Review 85(6), 37 (2007)
Dafoulas, G.A., Pateli, A.G., Turega, M.: Business-to-employee co-operation support through online job interviews. In: Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications, pp. 286–292. IEEE (2002)
Davis, D.: MySpace Isn’t Your Space: Expanding the Fair Credit Reporting Act to Ensure Accountability and Fairness in Employer Searches of Online Social Networking Services. Available at SSRN 1601471 (2007)
Facebook statistics by Country Socialbakers (2013), http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/ (retrieved)
Falcone, P.: Ninety-six Great Interview Questions to Ask Before You Hire. Amazon Books (2009)
Gindin, S.E.: Nobody Reads Your Privacy Policy or Online Contract: Lessons Learned and Questions Raised by the FTC’s Action against Sears. Nw. J. Tech. & Intell. Prop. 8(1) (2009)
Global mobile statistics 2013 Part A: Mobile subscribers; handset market share; mobile operators MobiThinking (2013), http://mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats/a (retrieved)
Goffin, R.D., Boyd, A.C.: Faking and personality assessment in personnel selection: Advancing models of faking. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne 50(3), 151 (2009)
Henson, B., Reyns, B.W., Fisher, B.S.: Security in the 21st Century Examining the Link Between Online Social Network Activity, Privacy, and Interpersonal Victimization. Criminal Justice Review 36(3), 253–268 (2011)
Hirsch, D.: The Law and Policy of Online Privacy: Regulation, Self-Regulation or Co-Regulation? ExpressO (2010), http://works.bepress.com/dennis_hirsch/1 (retrieved)
Hoofnagle, C., King, J., Li, S., Turow, J.: How different are young adults from older adults when it comes to information privacy attitudes and policies? Available at SSRN 1589864 (2010)
Leenes, R.: Context Is Everything Sociality and Privacy in Online Social Network Sites. In: Bezzi, M., Duquenoy, P., Fischer-Hübner, S., Hansen, M., Zhang, G. (eds.) Privacy and Identity. IFIP AICT, vol. 320, pp. 48–65. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Lenhart, A., Purcell, K., Smith, A., Zickuhr, K.: Social media & mobile internet use among teens and young adults, pp. 155–179. Pew Internet & American Life Project, Washington, DC (2010)
Lorenz, B., Kikkas, K.: Socially engineered commoners as cyber warriors-Estonian future or present? In: 2012 4th International Conference on Cyber Conflict (CYCON), pp. 1–12. IEEE (2012)
Madejski, M., Johnson, M.L., Bellovin, S.M.: The failure of online social network privacy settings. Department of Computer Science, Columbia University
Nissenbaum, H.: Protecting privacy in an information age: The problem of privacy in public. Law and Philosophy 17(5), 559–596 (1998)
Oolo, E., Siibak, A.: Performing for one’s imagined audience: Social steganography and other privacy strategies of Estonian teens on networked publics. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace 7(1), article 7 (2013), doi:10.5817/CP2013-1-7
Pollach, I.: Online privacy as a corporate social responsibility: an empirical study. Business Ethics: A European Review 20(1), 88–102 (2011)
Sanchez Abril, P., Levin, A., Del Riego, A.: Blurred Boundaries: Social Media Privacy and the Twenty-First Century Employee. American Business Law Journal 49(1), 63–124 (2012)
Schoening, K., Kleisinger, K.: Off-Duty Privacy: How Far Can Employers Go. N. Ky. L. Rev. 37, 287 (2010)
Slovensky, R., Ross, W.H.: Should human resource managers use social media to screen job applicants? Managerial and legal issues in the USA. Info 14(1), 55–69 (2012)
Smith, H.J., Dinev, T., Xu, H.: Information privacy research: An interdisciplinary review. MIS Quarterly 35(4), 989–1016 (2011)
Smith-Butler, L.: Workplace Privacy: We’ll Be Watching You. Ohio Northern Law Review 35 (2009)
Solove, D.: A Taxonomy of privacy. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 154(3), 477–564 (2006)
Zheleva, E., Getoor, L.: To join or not to join: the illusion of privacy in social networks with mixed public and private user profiles. In: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 531–540. ACM, New York (2009)
Tene, O.: Privacy: The new generations. International Data Privacy Law 1(1), 15–27 (2011)
Trochim, W.: Likert scaling, Research Methods Knowledge Base (2006), http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/scallik.php (retrieved)
Wang, Y., Norcie, G., Komanduri, S., Acquisti, A., Leon, P.G., Cranor, L.F.: I regretted the minute I pressed share: A qualitative study of regrets on Facebook. In: Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, p. 10. ACM (2011)
Vicknair, J., Elkersh, D., Yancey, K., Budden, M.C.: The Use of Social Networking Websites as a Recruiting Tool for Employers. American Journal of Business Education (AJBE) 3(11) (2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Lorenz, B., Kikkas, K. (2014). If I Do Not Like Your Online Profile I Will Not Hire You!. In: Zaphiris, P., Ioannou, A. (eds) Learning and Collaboration Technologies. Technology-Rich Environments for Learning and Collaboration. LCT 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8524. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07485-6_42
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07485-6_42
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-07484-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-07485-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)