Back in 2006, we published a Workforce Management article that squarely focused on the job-related perils of social networking. “Web sites such as MySpace.com and Facebook can contain details about candidates that make employers think twice about hiring them,” staff writer Ed Frauenheim wrote. “The Web pages people create there sometimes include racy photos and videos, images of drinking or other compromising information.”
I’ve always been worried about having too much personal information online. Although I use LinkedIn—and that’s probably due to my age —I’m not into some of the larger social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook. And as beneficial as I find LinkedIn, I also know I need to be careful about how much detail about myself I want on the Internet for everyone to see.
You may not worry about such things, or you may share my concerns, but either way, a new nationwide survey of employers by CareerBuilder.com should make you think again about the uses of social networking. According to the survey, 22 percent of hiring managers are using social networking sites to research job candidates, up from 11 percent in 2006. In addition, 9 percent of hiring professionals say that although they aren’t currently using social networking sites to screen employees, they plan to start doing so. In other words, almost a third of recruiting and staffing professionals are using or plan to use social networking sites to check up on potential hires.
And, there’s more to the CareerBuilder survey that hiring managers revealed:
• Some 40 percent of candidates posted inappropriate or provocative information about themselves on their social networking site.
• Nearly 30 percent revealed they had poor communication skills.
• Some 28 percent bad-mouthed their previous company or a fellow employee, while 27 percent lied about their qualifications.
• About 20 percent shared confidential information from a previous employer or linked themselves to criminal behavior.
That’s the bad news, but there are some positives that hiring managers reported as well:
• Nearly 50 percent found that a candidate’s background supported their qualifications for the job.
• Forty percent said that the candidate was a good fit for the company’s culture.
• Some 36 percent said that a candidate’s site presented a professional image.
• Twenty-four percent said the candidate’s profile was creative.
Yes, there are pluses to social networking, but also some perils for job seekers. And, it goes back to something I used to tell first-time computer users years ago: Always be careful what you write and post online, because no matter what it is, the last person you want to see it is likely to find it at the most inopportune time.
I’ve written before that layoffs are a one-on-one activity, that there’s only one right way to fire someone—in person, face to face, supervisor to worker. There’s a reason for this, and it is simple: It should be handled that way because management should be forced to personally confront the consequences of its actions.
An e-mail firing, I said at the time, is the ultimate management cop-out because it further dehumanizes a process that is pretty inhuman to begin with.
Well, here’s another example of a company letting employees know of a layoff via e-mail, but unlike RadioShack, this instance was due to a dumb mouse-click mistake.
Advertising Age, a sister publication of Workforce Management, reports that “struggling media agency Carat is planning a major restructuring of its U.S. operations, including an undetermined number of layoffs—news it accidentally released today via a memo the agency’s top New York-based HR executive e-mailed to the entire agency that appeared to be intended only for senior managers.”
Yes, the company’s chief people officer accidentally e-mailed Microsoft PowerPoint and Word documents about how the company was planning to handle layoffs “to all staffers before the mistake was realized, and it was pulled back by the IT department.” The documents, which were sent to Advertising Age and are now posted on adage.com, “detail talking points for managers as they talk to clients, vendors, the press and employees as Carat tries to navigate the fallout from the news” of the layoffs.
If you look at the documents, you’ll quickly see that the company was trying to take great care to manage the layoffs and give managers guidance on how to talk to employees and clients and manage the situation to the best of their ability. There’s some silly politically correct language in there—they want layoffs referred to as “right-sizing”—but for the most part, Carat’s management team seems to have been trying to do the right thing.
Unfortunately, those good intentions won’t matter in the end. All the soon-to-be former employees of Carat will remember is that they were told about a mass layoff—that might include them—by e-mail. Sure, it was inadvertent, but no one is going to remember that part. What will persist is the sting of being dismissed in a very impersonal way.
Another problem for Carat will be scraping off the ceiling the people it wasn’t firing—who Carat really wants to keep, in fact—but who also got the misdirected memo. One of the talking points prepared for managers in response to any questions about further reductions noted that “although no one can ever predict what the future will bring, we do not anticipate another action of this nature in the foreseeable future.” Somehow, I don’t think the left-behind employees will buy that.
Advertising Age asked me to comment for its story since Workforce Management writes about these issues all the time. As someone who has occasionally sent out an embarrassing e-mail to the wrong person (which almost everyone does at least once), I feel for Rose Zory, Carat’s chief people officer, who sent out the e-mail in question. She simply made a mistake, in the heat of the moment, and probably wants to crawl into a hole right now.
But as I told Advertising Age, “You would think that the chief people officer would be more careful given their position in the company—a reasonable assumption to make—but that’s not always the case. Owning up to the problem, apologizing and emphasizing it was a terrible mistake won’t solve this or make it better, but can go a long way toward getting beyond it quickly. Still, if I were the CEO, I might want to start looking for a new chief people officer. You pay those people to step up in these situations, not make it worse.”
Ever wonder what PR people do when things are slow and they have too much time on their hands? I’ve got an answer to that: They huddle in corners and make up fake workplace problems.
I’ve written before about how so many experts seem to come out of the woodwork with “solutions” to problems like romance in the office (around Valentine’s Day), office pools and gambling (around the men’s college basketball tournament in March), and the perils of the company holiday party in December. Although there are some legitimate HR issues associated with all of these events, they get blown out of proportion by way too many PR people who are more interested in hawking their “expert” with an answer looking for media exposure (usually with yet another boring book to sell) than actually addressing a pressing workplace issue.
These issues are the urban legends of the workplace. There is no more evidence of employee productivity losses or other problems because of these events than there is evidence of alligators in the sewers, Elvis living with aliens, or the Loch Ness monster.
Now, in August, there’s another bogus workplace issue to add to the list: employees wasting time watching the Olympics at work. Below you’ll find the press release about this “problem” that we received this week at the Workforce Management world headquarters. The names have been removed to protect the guilty and clueless:
“With NBC boasting 7.8M unique visitors to their website on Monday, along with 15M video streams and 230M page views the first four days of the Olympics, which easily surpasses the ENTIRE 2004 Athens games, the 2008 Olympics are on pace to be the most watched ever.
“How are businesses addressing the effect that the most popular Olympics to date will have on employee productivity and workplace Internet access for the month of August? XXXX County, Maryland’s CIO, (name deleted), is using a product from (Company X) to monitor its 3000+ employees’ web usage, ensuring the county’s critical applications, staff productivity, and network resources don’t suffer as a result of the games.
“Please let me know if you are interested in speaking with (name deleted) and/or (Company X) about how companies can avoid hosting the Olympics at the office this summer.”
Is there a single manager anywhere in America worried about the Olympics cutting into productivity? The only “evidence” I can find, if you can even call it that, is this “survey” that is reported at the “News Lite: It Barely Qualifies As News” Web site. The claim is that 18 percent of workers age 18-24 “say they will catch part of the Olympics while working,” but again, there is no evidence of how this “survey” was conducted, who was surveyed or when the question was asked.
Interestingly enough, I got another press release on workers using the Internet at work for their personal purposes this week from the Kansas State University media relations office. It quotes Diane Swanson, a management professor at the university, who claims that checking the latest score on your computer or taking home a few pens from the office needs to be put in proper perspective. Swanson says: “I’m not dismissing it as a legitimate question but, for one thing, it pales in comparison to the massive highway robbery that has gone on at the top of organizations because of corporate scandals.”
And in case you think that Professor Swanson is making a case for stealing from the office, she’s not. Her memo talks about the need for businesses to talk to employees about striking a balance on these issues when so many are traveling, telecommuting and working from home. Take a read and I’m sure you agree.
But back to watching the Olympics at work: Is this a problem anywhere? Are you worried about it at your workplace? I’d love to hear from anyone out there who thinks this is a big deal (either with a comment posted here or an e-mail sent to me at jhollon@workforce.com), because in my mind, this is just another PR-driven workplace fairy tale.
“A year after a scandal engulfed the Port of Seattle’s Police Department over smutty, derogatory e-mails, 15 more employees in a different section of the port have been caught exchanging similar e-mails, some for nearly a year,” according to a story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “The employees were part of a survey crew in the aviation division. Spokeswoman Terri-Ann Betancourt said eight employees, including the crew’s top two managers, were fired … seven others were suspended without pay. Four contract workers were found to be involved in the e-mails and were dismissed from the crew’s project, which had been the repaving of a runway.”
I won’t go into the details of what was sent in the e-mails (the Post-Intelligencer story does a pretty good job of that, if you’re interested), but suffice it to say that “the e-mails, which contained pornographic, racist, sexist and demeaning material, started as early as June 2007, soon after [Seattle Port Chief Executive Tay] Yoshitani informed employees of his zero-tolerance policy against harassment and improper computer use.” The chief had to remind his workforce to not send such e-mails after the Post-Intelligencer reported last year “that nearly a third of the Port of Seattle’s sworn police force had been exchanging racist, sexist and sexually graphic e-mails for years, until a few were finally reprimanded.”
What kind of person, working in a professional position in today’s modern workforce, doesn’t understand that sending stuff like this over an employer’s computer is wrong and grounds for immediate termination? The Port of Seattle situation is even more unbelievable, given that this very same problem erupted a year ago in a sister agency (the port’s police department) and steps were taken then to raise everyone’s consciousness about it.
This story also shows you that sometimes, the most interesting details are the ones you have to hunt a bit for. The Seattle Times version of this same story reported that “The Port of Seattle has fired eight employees and four consultants [emphasis added] for inappropriate computer use, including viewing sexually explicit photos, sexually oriented jokes and jokes about race, gender and national origin.”
Let me get this straight: Four consultants engaged in this behavior—consultants who were brought in by the Port of Seattle, probably at a premium rate of pay, to advise on best practices? I could go off on a rant about consultants here— I believe that too many are paid too much to tell you and your organization what you probably already know. In this case, I’ll just say that the situation in Seattle really speaks to how consultants are just given too much free rein when they get hired, and that this is probably even more the case at a public agency than it is in the private sector.
Port of Seattle Commission President John Creighton told The Seattle Times that he did not see the offensive e-mails and other content, but had them described to him. He said some of it was as “vile and disgusting” as the police e-mails that were so troublesome the year before.
“When setting a zero-tolerance policy, it is appropriate to hold people absolutely accountable,” Creighton told The Seattle Times. “We’re a public agency, and it is appropriate the public holds us to a higher standard.”
I know Creighton is right, but this makes me wonder: If a public agency should be held to a higher standard, why is Seattle dealing with this same problem so soon after the last incident was made public? My guess is probably the same as yours—it’s because the people managing the public agency aren’t being held as publicly accountable as they should be.
Well, Facebook got a big win in a California courtroom when a “federal judge in San Jose late Wednesday rejected a bid by founder Mark Zuckerberg’s longtime adversaries to reopen a recent confidential settlement in a case,” the Mercury News reports.
“The principals of ConnectU, who claimed that Zuckerberg stole source code and ideas from them while they all were attending Harvard, were hoping to revisit a confidential settlement reached Feb. 22, based on new evidence that it said had surfaced in Zuckerberg’s instant message logs,” according to the paper’s latest story.
“But Judge James Ware rejected their bid, issuing his ruling two days after a hearing Monday that he ordered closed to the press. … Ware rejected ConnectU’s claims that Facebook had committed securities fraud in procuring the settlement … (and the judge) appeared to concur with a Massachusetts judge who portrayed ConnectU’s attempt to undo the settlement as ‘buyer’s remorse.’ ”
This still doesn’t change my opinion that Facebook and MySpace are overhyped by people who seem to have a singular goal of convincing the world that social networking sites are a really big deal in—and the clear future of—recruiting.
That remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: Facebook can get on with its business life without a potential company-killing legal action hanging over its head.
= Member Only
