Personal space: where social media natives draw the line.

Social media has blurred the already fine line between work and personal lives. In an ‘always on’ world is privacy a thing of the past?

Major advances in technology are always accompanied by claims that they herald fundamental social and economic change, either positive or negative. We are constantly confronted by headlines claiming social media is revolutionizing society, from the way we shop to the way we work; that it is ushering in a ‘brave new world’.

Many argue that social media has the potential to entirely change our relationship to work and employment. However, many of the issues concerning social media use in organisations are not new. They are based on the much older common law duty all employees have to act in good faith towards their employer. Legal issues concerning employee behaviour on social media, such as comments posted on personal accounts that damage an employer’s reputation, are becoming more common.  So, while the issues have not changed, the media employees are using has far greater reach and potential impact. This raises important questions about the shifting boundaries of ‘work’ and ‘private’ lives, and what parts of our lives are ‘off-limits’ to employers.

When an employee uses social media outside working hours, should that be considered part of their private life, or is privacy a thing of the past?

We might expect that of all of us, young graduates would be comfortable with social media. These digital natives are used to being constantly online and in contact, checking their phones and posting photos and comments as soon as they wake up. We commonly assume they don’t care about privacy and accept that the lines between work and non-work will be blurred as part of being ‘always on’. The findings of our recent qualitative research on the use of social media during graduate recruitment challenge these common assumptions.

We conducted interviews with young graduate job-seekers in Victoria to understand how they perceive the ways in which their online activity might affect their recruitment into graduate positions. Our concern was not with employers using social media to screen job applicants, but whether, and how, the possibility of such employer activity influenced graduates.

Our respondents overwhelmingly perceived a high likelihood that employers would view their social media activity and that this would influence their chances of getting the job they wanted.