Overview

Germany is considering a law that would ban employers from looking for information about job candidates on social networking sites such as Facebook. According to a draft of the bill, employers would be able to use publicly accessible information about applicants drawn from the internet, but not from social networking sites that serve ‘communication purposes’. The aim of the draft act is apparently to stop private information becoming public.

In the UK until now there has been little debate on whether an employer should be allowed to check out a job candidate’s profile on Facebook and other social networking sites, and anecdotally it does happen. However vetting candidates, in the sense of going out and investigating a candidate is still relatively unusual in the UK (other than where there is an obvious need for it, such as jobs that give employees information that may affect national security).

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