Look­ing for a new job? If you’re hop­ing to be recruit­ed via Face­book you’d bet­ter make sure your spelling’s up to scratch.

If you’re in the mar­ket for a new job then you’re already aware that recruiters might take a peek at Face­book pro­files as part of the inter­view process. But what you might not realise is that recruiters are look­ing through Face­book pro­files to find poten­tial can­di­dates before the vacan­cy has even been adver­tised. If you’re look­ing for media jobs, you’d bet­ter make sure you have a pres­ence on Twit­ter, Face­book and LinkedIn.

A sur­vey con­duct­ed ear­li­er this year by Job­vite, a com­pa­ny that sup­plies appli­cant track­ing soft­ware, has revealed that 92 per cent of recruiters are already using social media this year, or they were plan­ning on using it at the time the sur­vey was com­plet­ed. Last year that fig­ure stood at around 89 per cent. What’s per­haps most sur­pris­ing is that even if you don’t sup­ply the recruiter with your social media pro­files, they’ll look anyway.

What Are They Look­ing For?

What you post on Face­book will undoubt­ed­ly have an impact on what employ­ers think of you – they are look­ing for a can­di­date that will be a good fit for their com­pa­ny, as much as they are look­ing for some­one who can actu­al­ly do the job. How­ev­er in terms of pro­fes­sion­al infor­ma­tion, recruiters a like­ly to be impressed by mem­ber­ships and affil­i­a­tions to indus­try organ­i­sa­tions and they’re like­ly to react pos­i­tive­ly if you’ve got some vol­un­teer­ing experience.

Ref­er­ences to illic­it drugs, alco­hol con­sump­tion and posts that are sex­u­al in nature are, unsur­pris­ing­ly, a huge no-no, but per­haps the biggest turn off for recruiters look­ing for their next employ­ee is poor spelling and grammar.

What’s Hap­pen­ing on Facebook?

Of the three main net­works – the oth­ers being Twit­ter and LinkedIn — Face­book saw the biggest gain in recruiters using its ser­vices to find employ­ees. The num­ber rose from 55 per cent in 2011 to 66 per cent in 2012. Around a quar­ter of recruiters have found an employ­ee on Face­book – not by approach­ing peo­ple direct­ly, but by build­ing pages and pro­mot­ing open­ings using Face­book Ads.

Employ­ers are using Face­book groups, Ads and their own cor­po­rate pages to iden­ti­fy suit­able recruits and many cor­po­rate pages run cute apps that increase par­tic­i­pa­tion and ‘likes’. As we have already seen though, as well as using recog­nised meth­ods to gen­er­ate inter­est and fill vacan­cies, com­pa­nies are not averse to resort­ing to sub­terfuge in order to find their next can­di­date. It would be well worth any job seek­er mak­ing sure their pri­va­cy set­tings are all in order; unless of course their pro­files are squeaky clean. And they can spell.