A Site (Un)Seen: Using Social Media in Hiring Decisions

This article originally appeared in The Legal Intelligencer and is republished here with permission from www.law.com

It started a couple of years ago — my interest in social networking websites, that is. My wife, Jamie, had just gotten off a call with one of her oldest friends. Apparently, her friend had just joined some computer-based group that enabled her to get back in touch with some of her childhood friends with whom she had lost contact. Jamie asked me, "Have you ever heard of something called Facebook?"

I responded, "Facebook, what's Facebook?" To the computer we went. I speak without hyperbole when I say that our lives would never be the same.

For the next several weeks, Jamie and I would put our daughters to bed and retire to the couch for dinner (yup, that's where we eat dinner) for what I expected to be conversation about our days. That's not what happened. Instead, Jamie would grab the laptop, put it on her lap — which is of course where laptops