Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Weblog Mania

So (contrary to popular belief) I was not slacking off today but at a business competition, FBLA. While my partner and I were competing, we overheard that our speaking prompt might be about whether or not it is ethical for employers to look at the myspace or facebook profiles of any current or future employees to determine their position in the workspace. It turns out that the other team was trying to trick us into thinking that was the prompt and it actually wasn't. But that's okay.

I thought the problem was much more interesting than the inappropriate-relationships-at-work problem we thought and I would like to pose it to you guys.

Do you think looking at these profiles should factor into the judgment of possible employees in determining their effectiveness? For example, a person that is portrayed as a very social and unfocused individual on a myspace page versus a person with the exact same resume but no online profile are weighed and the one without a myspace gets the job. Do you think this is fair?
We came up with the solution that in order to ensure equal opportunity, an applicant should be informed that all public records concerning him or her would be looked at, just like they are required to talk about past convictions on an application. This would allow the applicants to have more equal chances in applying.

Please use personal examples and logic to justify. For example, I know that at Poudre a while ago there was some sort of situation with a teacher or coach looking at myspace accounts.

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