Le Web3 Live

For jobseekers, Facebook can’t hold a candle to Viadeo or LinkedIn, which are built specifically for business relationships. However, the global craze for Mark Zuckerberg’s invention means anyone could come across a jobseeker’s Facebook page. Applicants and employees should take care what they write on it, and job recruiters ought not to take what’s written at face value if they want to avoid a kind of “discrimination 2.0”. Here in France, where Facebook caught on last year, jobseekers and employers are beginning to understand they have to be careful.

Facebook jumped from 14 to 52 million members worldwide within a year. France entered the game relatively late, but quickly caught up in the last six months, reaching already 700,000 profiles, even though Facebook’s interface is still only available in English. With the first French version set to be released on Dec. 10, the initial success story of Mark Zuckerberg’s million-dollar baby should be confirmed in the next few months.

A new cooperative management style

Facebook is still largely confined to family and friends. However, at a time when 75% of French job seekers use the web, we’re likely to see more and more professional profiles emerge in the popular network, according to recruiter Jacques Froissant, head of the high-tech recruiting cabinet Altaïde in Paris, and also co-director of Moovement, a website specialised in job and internship research. “Social networks are helping to create a new type of professional relations, more direct and collaborative. The old pyramidal hierarchy is being replaced by a cooperative management style,” says Froissant.

Watch our interview of Jacques Froissant

Mind your privacy

This sounds great. But not every French employer is so open to Web 2.0 philosophy. On the contrary, some of them might be reluctant to hire an applicant too “cool” or too “different”.

Catherine Sanderson, a female blogger in Paris, thinks that “the biggest risk people take when speaking their mind on the web these days without the protection of anonymity is not getting fired, but, rather, not getting hired”. More and more employers check Google, Facebook or Myspace and what they find there - opinions expressed, photos of drunken nights out - may prevent them from employing someone. If you are fired, your employer has to justify that decision and observe certain procedures; if you are simply not hired, you have no recourse at all.

Ron, another blogger in Paris, has many gay friends who publish photos on Facebook of their crazy nights out. “They seem to forget they are executives during daylight,” Ron told us. According to him, there’s enough on his friends’ profiles to ruin a career or two… Ron gets then slightly paranoid : “Nobody can tell how these photos could be used one day. Google files everything. The less you are on it, the better it is”.

Ethical lessons for recruiters

Alain Gavand, another Parisian recruiting consultant, reckons that amateurism on social networks can be risky. “Any applicant on a social network should ask himself who his private information is aimed at. He must be careful about the quality of his network and the content of the information on it.”

According to Stéphane Boudin, a lawyer who specialises in new technologies, two-thirds of French bloggers are less than 25 years old. “They often do not have a professional culture and they’re not aware of the risk they take when they publish any private information”.

“The solution is not to hide oneself, but rather to educate job recruiters better,” believes Froissant.

Gavand agrees. “The recruiter has to be very ethical when he’s looking for applicant’s profiles on the web,” he says. “The risk of being sued for discrimination is practically nonexistent. Indeed, it is almost impossible for an applicant to find evidence of being victim of discrimination on the Web. How could you prove you’ve not been hired because of an element displayed on your Facebook page?”

There haven’t been examples of discrimination caused by social networks so far in France. But in the UK and the US, the phenomenon is already “pretty common”, according to Brad Karsh, president of JobBound, a company devoted to helping students get their first jobs. Karsh himself revealed a blatant example of a US job candidate who perished at the hands of Facebook a few months ago. “His number-one interest was ‘smoking blunts with the homies.’ His number-two interest was ‘busting caps in the whities.’ His third interest included sexually assaulting someone…” Needless to say, the student didn’t get a job at Karsh’s company.

Of course, this is a radical example. Gavand says that 4 categories of people are most likely to be discriminated against when applying for a job in France: women, seniors, the disabled, and people of black and North-African descent.

In addition to his recruiting activity, Gavand also runs a nonprofit organization aimed at fighting against job discrimination, A compétence égale. The association tries to make recruiters sensitive to ethical problems linked with discrimination, notably on the Web. Some 600 consultants from 30 recruiting agencies are already taking part in the project. Since there is rarely any evidence of discrimination 2.0, ethical issues are likely to remain a pious hope.