Drawing the line
There was a time when the line separating personal life from professional life was much clearer. In those days, employees were evaluated solely on the basis of their performance at work. Employers neither knew nor cared, and certainly made no effort to discover, what their employees were doing in their off time. So long as they showed up and performed well, employees could spend their weekends as they liked. Indeed, laws exist in many places to prevent even curious employers from prying into a prospective employee’s personal life. Questions to do with marital status, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation and the like are mostly illegal and, therefore, do not even figure in a potential employer’s thinking when hiring an individual.
Enter Social Media. Thanks to the advent of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like, the line of separation between personal and professional is now blurred and even with significantly more effort, keeping our private lives distinctly separate from our professional ones has become decidedly more difficult. This is not to suggest that most people spend their weekends on nefarious, outlandish, or offensive pastimes, but even our drinking habits, the establishments we visit, the politicians we support, and even photographs of our loved ones, may be aspects of our personal lives that we would prefer to keep to ourselves.
At their most basic, LinkedIn and Facebook are a social media platforms created for the purpose of enabling connections and communications. This suggests that keeping our lives segregated requires only that we follow this simple formula: "LinkedIn for Professional" and "Facebook for Personal".
If only it were that simple. For the majority of us, the professional aspect of our lives has long since invaded our Facebook accounts, as we connect with colleagues, customers or clients in the medium, even though we recognize that these connections may provide them with a glimpse into our personal lives. Facebook has apparently recognized this conundrum and recently launched “Workplace”, in response to it. Workplace is a product designed for business customers which enables internal employee communication and sharing by allowing employees to connect with each other on Facebook without using their personal accounts. This may help employees have a clearer separation between work and personal life, though the larger problem still remains.
In today’s world, employers no longer rely solely on resumes, interviews and references provided by a candidate to evaluate an employee before making a hire. Employers are also turning to social media and using it as a screening tool prior to hiring. In the Recruiter Nation survey conducted by Jobvite in 2015, 92% of the executive recruiters surveyed said they used social media as part of their hiring tool kit, including not just LinkedIn, but also Facebook, Twitter and even lesser known platforms like Snapchat and Tumblr. This would suggest that whatever social media platform we prefer, the things we choose to reveal on them become “public” in an irretrievable way, and this may well have unforeseen consequences. Without taking great care, it seems, a person’s private life may no longer be as private as it once was.
One advocate of using social media as a method of screening candidates is Nancy Flynn, the founder and executive director of the ePolicy Institute Companies. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, she explained that employers are looking for legitimate evidence to withdraw or reconsider a job offer, such as illegal activities like drugs, comments that are discriminatory, or signs that an applicant has been dishonest about work related matters (“Should Companies Monitor Their Employees' Social Media?”, October 22, 2014).
Although it is easy to understand why a company would want to hire someone who is ethical, has good morals, is free of drug problems, and so on, this must be balanced with the employee’s right to privacy. Thus, while it may be fair for employers to visit the social media platform to review any information that a potential candidate has shared publicly, taking it any further than that impacts the employee’s privacy.
Despite these protections provided by the law, however, some individuals may still question whether they should provide their password if asked by a prospective employer. If, for example, a person has been jobless for a lengthy period and has begun to feel desperate, s/he may cooperate simply to win the good graces of the employer. Or if the employer prefers a more subtle approach, s/he may send a Friend Request to candidates. According to a survey conducted by CareerBuilder in 2016, 36% of the employers who screen candidates via social networks have requested to friend or follow candidates and only nearly two-thirds of those were given permission (“Number of Employers Using Social Media to Screen Candidates Has Increased 500 Percent over the Last Decade”, Harris Poll, April 28, 2016). Perhaps just as worrying, the same CareerBuilder survey states that 41% of employers are less likely to interview job candidates if they are unable to find information about that person online, meaning that even a strategy to avoid social media altogether may not be effective either.
When I first started using Facebook, I decided that I would only accept Friend Requests from people whom I already regarded as friends. However, as my career began to move forward, I was forced to rethink that rule. What should I do if a client sends me a Friend Request? Ought I to follow the company pages of my clients and customers? Will a colleague feel rebuffed I decline to accept her Friend Request? And since such relationships are reciprocal, do I want to have that glimpse into the life of my colleague, my client, or my customer? Do such links create value or simply awkwardness?
Ultimately such decisions are up to each individual. For those used to the public eye, perhaps a completely blurred line between personal and professional is easily accepted, but for people who are very private about their lives, the decisions are more complex. We have to consider the industry we are in, the temperament and mores of our clients and customers, and what part of our lives do we want to reserve as private? There are arguments on both sides of the equation, in favor of and against blurring the line, but the strongest points seem to be these:
PROS
Social media ties help forge a better relationship with the colleagues, clients and customers. Depending on the industry, sell cycles can be very long, sometimes even years between transactions, and the maintenance of long-term relationships is key. Colleagues may be separated by travel, differing project demands, and basic schedules, but still need to maintain a bond. The beauty of social media is that every time we post, we make ourselves “present” to our social media network, reinforce our personal brand, and bring ourselves top of mind for our audience. The fact that sometimes the things being shared are personal and private may bring the relationship to another level and create the opportunity for an entirely new type of communication when we next meet.
CONS
Thanks to social media, we are “always on” and if our personal and professional circles have been joined, constant self-editing may be required. Before every post we write, we find ourselves stopping to consider the audience. Friends and family may be familiar with, even cherish, our pictures of the Christmas Party and antics at the proverbial punch bowl, but do we want our professional contacts to see us “warts and all”? And what about humor? Some may find an off-color joke quite funny, while others taken offense. It is not just our “wild sides” we would have to conceal on Facebook, but our religious beliefs, our political views, our memberships, causes, and hobbies.
For 21st Century employees, adhering strictly to the rule of “LinkedIn for Professional” and “Facebook for Personal” may help to maintain a clear division between the two sides of life, at least temporarily, but as a society we appear to be moving in a direction of a blurred line between the professional and the personal that may ultimately undo the compartmentalization of times past. For some, this may lead to a much greater degree of self-censure when it comes to posting personal information online, but for most of us, it will simply require a greater degree of comfort with the idea that true privacy exists only in the confines of our own heads.
-Rongine Koh