According to a recent survey conducted by CareerBuilder, 45% of employers reported using social networks to screen prospective job candidates. This is a significant jump from 22 percent last year. Approximately 11 percent stated that they plan to start using social networks to research potential employees in the future.

Over 2,600 hiring managers were included in the survey, which was completed in June.

Of the employers who do online searches, due diligence and background checks on job candidates, 29% use Facebook, 26% use LinkedIn and 21% use MySpace. About 11% search blog posts and 7% search Twitter profiles.

No suprisingly, the top industries that use social networks and search engines to research job candidates via social networking sites are those that specialize in technology and sensitive information, including IT employers at 63% and Professional and B2B Services at 53%.

Over one third of employers say they have found online content on social networks that caused them not to hire a job candidate.

14% of employers have passed on a potential employee because the job candidate sent an online message using an emoticon and 16% report excluding a job candidate for using shorthand text language such as LOL in an email or application.

In addition, 18% of employers say they have found content on social network profiles that caused them to hire a job candidate.

Rosemary Haefner is Vice President of Human Resources at CareerBuilder and advises job seekers that: “Social networking is a great way to make connections with potential job opportunities and promote your personal brand across the Internet. Make sure you are using this resource to your advantage by conveying a professional image and underscoring your qualifications.”

Rosemary gives the following specific advice for people seeking jobs —–

1. Clean up digital dirt BEFORE you begin your job search. Remove any photos, content and links that can work against you in an employer’s eyes.

2. Consider creating your own professional group on sites like Facebook or BrightFuse.com to establish relationships with thought leaders, recruiters and potential referrals.

3. Keep gripes offline. Keep the content focused on the positive, whether that relates to professional or personal information. Makes sure to highlight specific accomplishments inside and outside of work.

4. Remember that other people can see your friends, so be selective about who you accept as friends. Monitor comments made by others. Consider using the “block comments” feature or setting your profile to “private” so only designated friends can view it.

5. Do not mention your job search if you’re still employed.

Source: MarketWatch.com

The snitch.name site let’s users search people profiles on multiple social networks and people search sites. Users can pick and choose which sites to search from a list of 39 of the top social networks and people search engines.

Some of the searches that snitch.name includes in their list are useless at best, but the site does include popular social network searches like Facebook, Twitter, Hi5, Netlog, Myspace and Linkedin.

The Snitch search engine also includes some good online people search engines like Pipl, 123People, Wink and Zoominfo.

You can try the Snitch social search for yourself at Snitch.

A recent study by a US marketing firm suggests that as much as 40% of tweets on Twitter are ‘pointless babble’.

Pear Analytics randomly sampled 2,000 tweets from Twitter’s public stream and divided them into six categories: news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational and pass-along value.

Pear found that 811 of the sampled tweets ( 40.55 percent ) fell into the “pointless babble” category.

About 751 ( 37.55 percent ) of the sampled messages were categorized as Conversational messages. Conversational messages are defined by Pear as tweets that go back and forth between Twitter users.

Pear found that only 8.70% of tweets had “pass-along value”. These were tweets that users “re-tweeted” or passed on to their followers.

Corporate self-promotion accounted for 5.85% of tweets, followed by blatant Twitter spam at 3.75%.

News from media outlets accounted for only 3.60 percent of all the tweets sampled.

Pear plans to run the study every quarter to identify Twitter trends.

Source: Breitbart.com

Here is how social networks can take dumb criminals and make them even dumber.

A thief who stole a computer and other items from a woman’s house logged into the the woman’s Facebook account and boasted about the theft, even going so far as to say that the Television in the her house wasn’t good enough to take.

The items were taken from Victoria Richardson, who resides in the UK. The thief took an iPhone, a Nintendo DS, a handbag, some cash and credit cards and a computer. After the crime had been committed Victoria logged into her Facebook account only to find that the bragging bandit had left messages on her profile, stating:

“on my new laptop”

“Listening to music on my new phone feels so good.”

“I have the laptop , phones ok but a bit scratched itll do, tv was rubbish so I left it, ds was a bonus, now to the porn shop, thankyou toshiba is my favourite make”.

“regards your night time burglar”.

Victoria Richardson stated: “I felt very spooked. I have never felt like that before. It felt like they were rubbing my nose in it.”

However, the social networking bandit shows that the criminal isn’t very bright. Publishing a record of their crime on Facebook can only help the police with their investigation. It wouldn’t even be surprising if the thief has a Facebook profile of their own, since they had no trouble figuring out what Facebook is and using it as a tool for their bravado.

Using Facebook’s social search, you could take the comments above as examples of the thief’s writing style and compare it to comments on other Facebook profiles whose geographic location is near the victim’s.

Source: Mashable

Spokeo search allows you to track people and friends on your email contact list across most of the top social networks like Linkedin, Facebook and Myspace.

Users can login to the Spokeo search service using their logon from various popular email accounts and Spokeo will search their contact list for users that are registered on the dozens of social network sites that Spokeo indexes.

In addition, Spokeo also offers special services for law enforcement, job recruiters and human resource professionals.

You can try the Spokeo service for yourself below.