It appears that many more accountancy and finance organisations are turning to the web to perform background checks on prospective employees. Gone are the days when employers relied solely on a candidate’s CV to build a profile of the individual. There are now so many publicly available sources of information, each of them accessible through a simple Google search, that employers can easily perform some rudimentary background checks.

See for yourself: just Google your name and see what information is available about you.

With so many people directly or indirectly publishing personal information on the web, either through: web sites, blogs or profiles on social networking sites, there’s a wealth of information available to anyone who needs to find out more about your background.

Much has recently been written about the legitimacy of using the web to profile employees, citing the Mullins case in the US, where it was alleged that a Mr. Mullins lost his job after his employer Googled his name and found that he had been fired from his previous two jobs. In fact, this case rests more on the issue that Mr. Mullins had 102 cases of misconduct rather than what was discovered through Google.

 However, this does highlight some important concerns: information about you (whether good or bad) is available on the web; once indexed, this information is often difficult to remove and, furthermore, employers are starting to use this information to better understand their employees and prospective employees. This becomes very significant for professional services organisations (e.g. accountancy practices, consultancies, legal firms) where their clients could perform similar checks on the consultants/ advisors who are assigned to them. 

For candidates we advocate a cautionary approach when publishing information on the web. Remember that on the web there are no boundaries between your personal and professional life; so before you add your real name to anything that you publish, be sure to evaluate the impact. The information you publish is likely to be available to all and may be there for a long time. 

For employers there are several factors to consider. Although these checks can provide some quick, basic background information, can you be certain that the information relates to the candidate in question? Names are seldom unique and you could be tracking the wrong person or mixing information about several individuals. Also, if you collate or store information from the web you may be contravening privacy or data protection legislation. 

The trend suggests that sooner or later most accountancy and finance organisations will use the web to check details of prospective employees. So candidates beware of what you publish on the web.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Accountancy & Finance, Accountancy Firms, Accountancy jobs, Finance jobs, CV Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.