Face it
October 1st, 2008 by Matt West
Facebook continues its world domination, and it’s time employee communicators take note: Facebook is here to stay.
It’s the new job applicant screener:
A survey by online job site CareerBuilder.com of 3,169 hiring managers found 22 percent of them screened potential staff via social networking profiles, up from 11 percent in 2006.
The survey found that 34 percent of the managers who do screen candidates on the Internet found content that made them drop the candidate from any short list.
“While Mark Zuckerberg and others, brand Facebook a Social Utility, for young people, who really only care about functionality, Facebook succeeds because it is the killer web application for communications and personal information management. Facebook Mail is not without its problems, but the combination of Facebook Mail, Facebook Chat, and what is functionally an auto updating address book, makes Facebook into the new Outlook not only for those who are inside of Silicon Valley, but for anyone of the millions of people who use Facebook as either their sole or their primary digital identity.”
“I told all the employees it’s OK on a Friday for everybody to goof off and spend an hour or two on Facebook,” [Serena Software CEO Jeremy Burton] explains to me at lunch in New York. “I said ‘Go nuts! I dare you to participate, and I bet you’ll find out something new about somebody in the company that you never knew before.”
“The subversive message was ‘Guys – the world is a different place and if we’re going to stay relevant we’re going to have to wake up.’”
“It’s been a game-changer for us to go from an insular culture that doesn’t communicate much to a more collaborative culture.”
The question for communicators is no longer whether or not to allow employees access, but how it fits into their company’s broader employee communications strategy.
Tags: facebook
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