Its common practice for employers to check out candidates this way, and understandable too.. An advertising agency I know even stated that they expected any future candidates to have a significant presence online - contributing to blogs and so on in a professional sense.
Many of us use social networking to make professional connections, so we shouldn't be too surprised when employers effectively take us up on our offer.
The issue is a real problem for people looking to change jobs. Many employees are contractually barred from taking part in Linked-in or posting their CV to recruitment sites, and that is unfairly restrictive.
The job market should be a transparent one, where employees feel free to say to their bosses - "naturally I'm in the market for a better offer" - in other words, employees should be free to exercise the same right to choose how they sell their services, as employers are as buyers of those services.
I've been working on a new "ethical recruitment" site that hides employees from their current employers. It works by allowing candidates to select domains that represent the firms they wish to hide from. So if my employer was Microsoft, I'd select microsoft.com, and any other domains user by Microsoft employees for email.
Without a human check, that wouldn't be water tight, so all employer registrations are checked by humans before being activated so that employers don't get to masquerade as dummy companies and troll for information.
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Its common practice for employers to check out candidates this way, and understandable too.. An advertising agency I know even stated that they expected any future candidates to have a significant presence online - contributing to blogs and so on in a professional sense.
Many of us use social networking to make professional connections, so we shouldn't be too surprised when employers effectively take us up on our offer.
The issue is a real problem for people looking to change jobs. Many employees are contractually barred from taking part in Linked-in or posting their CV to recruitment sites, and that is unfairly restrictive.
The job market should be a transparent one, where employees feel free to say to their bosses - "naturally I'm in the market for a better offer" - in other words, employees should be free to exercise the same right to choose how they sell their services, as employers are as buyers of those services.
I've been working on a new "ethical recruitment" site that hides employees from their current employers. It works by allowing candidates to select domains that represent the firms they wish to hide from. So if my employer was Microsoft, I'd select microsoft.com, and any other domains user by Microsoft employees for email.
Without a human check, that wouldn't be water tight, so all employer registrations are checked by humans before being activated so that employers don't get to masquerade as dummy companies and troll for information.
Its a brand new site so there's not much there yet, but check out http://www.playfairandnoble.com./