.bodytext {float: left; } .floatimg-left-hort { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right: 10px; width:300px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-caption-hort { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:300px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-vert { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right:15px; width:200px;} .floatimg-left-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; font-size: 10px; width:200px;} .floatimg-right-hort { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px;} .floatimg-right-caption-hort { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px; font-size: 10px; } .floatimg-right-vert { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px;} .floatimg-right-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; font-size: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; border-top-style: double; border-top-color: black; border-bottom-style: double; border-bottom-color: black;} .floatimgright-sidebar p { line-height: 115%; text-indent: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar h4 { font-variant:small-caps; } .pullquote { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 150px; background: url(http://www.dmbusinessdaily.com/DAILY/editorial/extras/closequote.gif) no-repeat bottom right !important ; line-height: 150%; font-size: 125%; border-top: 1px solid; border-bottom: 1px solid;} .floatvidleft { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatvidright { float:right; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} Well, the day has finally arrived! Your top candidate is coming in to interview for one of your most hard-to-fill positions, and you couldn’t be more excited.

You have the interview room prepped, and you have made sure you have water or coffee to offer your prospective employee. You’re wearing your power suit and have freshly memorized the company mission statement, vision and purpose. You can’t wait to dazzle the candidate with your great benefits and flexible working options.

The candidate shows up five minutes early; you head to the interview room and everything is golden. After a 90-minute interview that seemed like five minutes, you say your goodbyes and go back to your office to mull over the interview. You want to extend an offer, but you don’t want to seem too needy, so you decide to wait. And in the waiting is where the trouble begins.

Technology being what it is, and believing knowledge is power, you decide to do some last-minute research on the candidate. You go to MySpace and find the candidate’s page and a slew of information that quickly makes that person completely undesirable. So you quickly move on to your second choice.

The above scenario is happening more and more as technology and social networking explode. Employers are searching out prospective candidates and making hiring decisions about them based on all available data. The problem is that today’s generation is very computer savvy, and some of the information you find online could be fraudulent. Unscrupulous people create fake MySpace, Facebook, or Linkedin pages to hurt the credibility and hireability of perceived competitors for jobs. Even high school kids do this to get even with someone.

Sometimes the information is subtle and sometimes explicit. Not only does identity hijacking hurt employment opportunities for a great candidate, but it also puts out a false image of this person. To top it off, the victim may not know the page exists. Social networking information is only as good as the integrity of the data, and once something is put out into cyberspace, it doesn’t disappear easily. You can never truly recover.

Now there is another view to this scenario. The information about you being a partying boozehound who loves to skip work and catch baseball games is true. And your friends’ numerous comments on your site ensure that no employer will miss it.

The funny thing about both of these comparisons is that each suffers from a certain naiveté. One is employers believing everything they read about someone on a Web site and acting on it, not to mention the potential legal ramifications for denying employment based on these sites. The other is job seekers creating a social networking page in high school or college without the forethought that it will follow them for the rest of their career.

If you don’t believe me, go to www.archive.org and visit some Web pages and sites that you might have thought were gone. As was said to Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Nick Reddin is the business development manager at Manpower Inc.’s Des Moines office.