The new opt-in feature worked pretty well in my brief trial and would probably be a handy feature for anyone looking to get a job where you can sit on a bouncy ball all day, get free meals and play foosball on your lunch breaks. But integrating Google+ data into a job board also raises issues about privacy and the continuing trend of bringing your personal activities into the dog-eat-dog world of professional life.
Facebook also recently announced Graph Search, another tool that could cause trouble for job seekers since it can be used to glean public data from your profile. Potential searches such as “Photos of Bob Johnson at parties” could make for an interesting follow-up interview, depending on what kind of life you lead.
The difference with Google jobs and Google+, however, is that it's not clear what kind of firewall there is between your profile and your job application, once submitted. The privacy policy for Google Jobs says any information you submit will be used to assess your candidacy. That doesn't seem to include your Google+ profile, but it's not explicitly made clear.
Here's how it works:
On the left-hand side of the job search page, you have filters to narrow your search by location and specific teams inside Google. On the right-hand side, you will see people at Google you may know and a button to add them to your circles. And, according to Google Plus Daily, which first reported on the new Google+ integration, you will also see people who work at Google and are already in your circles.
If you apply for a job, your basic information including name, education and current job are automatically filled out for you, making the application process a little bit faster.
Google+ integration seems like a handy feature, but the idea of integrating social networking data into the job process still makes me a bit squeamish. Especially given how easy it is for online photos and other posts to leak out unintentionally. Not all social networks are created equal, however, and some are entirely appropriate for the professional world.
Twitter could also work for jobs since the entire premise of the self-styled information network is to create a record of public posts. Google+ could perhaps fall into a similar category to Twitter since, in my experience, many people freely connect on Google+ with strangers who have shared interests. I wouldn't share family photos on Google+, for example, even with my private family circle. That's an activity I reserve for Facebook.
I guess it's too much to ask employers to refrain from seeking out our profiles on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter to check up on their prospective hires. So it's up to us as individuals to make sure our more peculiar or embarrassing sides are well hidden from prying eyes by keeping our privacy settings up-to-date. Or maybe by not sharing so much of ourselves online in the first place.
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