DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Discussion

 

The results of this study were somewhat in accordance to my initial expectations. While not all economic sectors were able to be taken into account, the more creative economic sectors “Education,” “News Media” and “Customer Care” use their posted content to both screen-in and screen-out potential employees (72.7%). The results contradict the alternative hypothesis which suggested that hiring managers only view posted content to screen-out potential employees because only 18.2% of the subjects aligned their response with this alternative hypothesis.

 

According to the survey conducted at collegegrad.com “nearly 40 percent of workers with social networking profiles have not modified their pages with potential employers in mind” (www.collegegrad.com... Most social networking websites allow users to post with privacy according to their user-specific privacy setting, which can block access to “your user profile, personal info, status updates, photos and videos tagged of you, friends lists, wall posts, and education and work information” (Baig). Many users do not take advantage of these settings allowing every piece of posted information to e available for scrutiny and jeopardizing their (potential) job. With almost half of the subjects that web-check candidates preferring that a candidates’ profile be set to “private” (45.5%) according to the study conducted, more candidates should consider this option. If given a second opportunity to build upon what research has already been conducted, a survey design would be administered to former and current social networking website users. This questionnaire could determine if the impact of “employers” on social networking sites to discover if this negatively impacts users' function to post public content and if this ultimately diminishes the purpose of social networking sites for users to express themselves. To completely understand the impact of Web 2.0 tools on employments, one must not only take the vantage point of employers, but also of employee.

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.