Job Hunting on Facebook

Facebook occupies an odd place in the social media spectrum when it comes to finding a job.

As someone who talks about social media technologies often in public forums, I regularly hear about how reticent they are to open up their Facebook profiles to recruiters for searches. Due to the nature of how Facebook grew up as a personal and truly social site, the reaction is completely understandable.

However, it's also unrealistic to believe that recruiters aren't going to gravitate here. They can and will use Facebook to recruit for the following reasons:

• Compare the 45 million users on LinkedIn vs the 300 million on Facebook. If four out of five adults in the US use social media once a month as Forrester says, that's a much wider net of active users.
• It is in Facebook's interest to broaden its appeal in the professional space since it will attract more mature users. At present, Facebook's fastest-growing demographic is individuals 35 years and up.
• Facebook serves up a younger demographic than LinkedIn. The average Facebook user is about 31 and the average LinkedIn user is 41.
• Although it's easy enough to skip, Facebook allows you to fill out your work history just like LinkedIn
• A recent CNNMoney.com article points out that Facebook's friendships are more authentic and therefore more reliable than the more narrowly focused LinkedIn platform. The stronger the relationship, some recruiters reason, the better the chance for a warm referral to your next hire.
• A recruiter who finds a viable candidate for a position on Facebook stands a better chance of connecting with him or her immediately via messages, pokes, SMS, or live chat--all built into Facebook. LinkedIn only supports message updates.

With that in mind, you may want to reevaluate how you're using Facebook. While many of us may be uncomfortable with the thought of the world of work colliding with our goofy high school friends and all the embarrassing photos they have posted about you, the collapse of the personal and professional may well be inevitable.

You've got a few choices. You can continue to wall off your personal profile on Facebook and lock down the privacy settings for your account so that your profile reveals nothing about you. Creative recruiters can and will continue to find ways around this, but it may keep you inaccessible for a time.

You can blend your professional and personal profiles. This isn't always something easy to do. In fact, it may be impossible without 'rebooting' your profile (something more than one of my friends has decided to do) and being more selective about what goes up in this public space.

Finally, the least likely alternative but probably the safest if you really don't companies finding you in this venue is to simply delete your account and leave Facebook forever. It seems a shame that you'd be so worried that you'd want to kill your online presence for fear of an employer maybe finding you, but if your profile has something deeply embarrassing or inappropriate on it, that may be the only choice.

On the other hand, if you do want to be found, there's a lot to recommend using Facebook as part of your overall strategy to find a job. Fill out your profile, open up your privacy options to show information about your work history, and make it easy to connect with you.