The Butt Ugly Weblog

Gimme, gimme

...your Facebook password, seem quite a few companies to say these days. I think their motivation is to ensure that they don't hire "bad" people (for some arbitrary definition of bad), but this practice is probably more damaging than beneficial at large. What people do on their spare time isn't really the employer's concern; and at least in Finland this is even codified into legislation: the Finnish officials take a very dim view on even googling your interviewee, unless they've specifically given permission for it.

(BTW, we're hiring summer interns at Thinglink - be a dear and include links to the relevant profiles that you want us to check out. For example, great Stack Overflow and Github profiles really make you look good. But if you don't tell us about them, we can't know about them...)

Anyhow, my entire issue here is really that of trust: If I, as an employer, asked you to provide your username and password to private information (something that's quite expressly prohibited by Facebook terms of service and is against the first security precaution anyone is ever taught: Never ever share your password with anyone), and you gave it to me willingly - how could I possibly trust you with any confidential information, or even a cash register, knowing that with some pressure, you will cave in and share it all with the next guy who happens to ask?

I know a lot of people don't really think that there's any harm in sharing their Facebook statuses (or their friend's statuses - giving out your password to other people also violates the trust placed on you by these other people), and that people really want these jobs, but still: stop and consider how it makes you look. Signaling that you're an untrustworthy person who will do anything for their own good isn't probably the kind of an image you want to give.