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Monday, October 26, 2009

Recruiters shouldn’t care about that Facebook picture of your beer pong game in college

It’s becoming a litany.

In a meeting or during a presentation, somebody—usually an HR rep or recruiter—will tell me how many candidates she has rejected based on something she saw on the candidate’s Facebook or MySpace profile. In every case, it has been something along the lines of a photo taken during a party at college. My response: “If your employer knew what you did during college, would you have been hired?”

College is for two things: Getting an education and being stupid. The only difference between college when I went and college today is that there was no Facebook, or anything remotely like it, during my days at university.

Today, we’re living through one of the most remarkable transitions in history. We’re moving from an era during which people were secretive and kept things close to the vest to an era where everyone is networked and everyone shares everything. And those who grew up in the soon-to-be bygone era are making hiring decisions about people who grew up in the era that is hurtling toward us like an out-of-control freight train.

It has become conventional wisdom for people of my generation to wag their fingers at millenials, warning them of the dangers that await if they’re too open with their extracurricular activities. Even Dan Tapscott, whose “Grown Up Digital” does an admirable job of explaining the Net Generation, insists that the one thing they don’t get is that sharing outrageous behavior today will come back to bite them in the ass a few years down the road when they’re trying to get hired.

That’s true today, with people who kept their late-night fraternity-house drinking binges on the QT. It won’t be so long, though, before the hiring managers have shared just as much of their social lives online as the recruits they’re looking to hire. The fact that people got drunk and engagred in questionable behavior in school just won’t matter.

Consequently, that Animal House behavior really shouldn’t matter to hiring managers today. Like I say, the hiring manager probably engaged in some pretty stupid behavior of his own when he was in college, too. The fact that he did shots off a co-ed’s belly when he was 19 didn’t make him a bad hire when he was 23.

Back in 1987, Judge Douglas Ginsburg didn’t make it onto the U.S. Supreme Court because he’d smoked a little pot when he was in college. Today, denying a job to anybody who ever tried marijuana in college carves a huge slice out of the pool of prospective candidates. A prospect’s social behavior in college is simply not a predictor of their value as an employee.

Recruiters and HR people can even eek out a competitive edge by overlooking a four-year-old picture on a Facebook page and focusing on their qualifications today. After all, that’s what today’s candidates will be doing in five years when they’re the ones making the hiring decisions.