A Facebook Fairy Tale
Thanks to social networking Internet hangouts like Facebook and MySpace, employers have more ways than ever to see if employees are telling the truth.
On Halloween, Kevin Colvin, an intern at the Anglo Irish Bank of North America, emailed his boss, Paul Davis, and told him he would have to miss work. “Something came up at home and I had to go to New York this morning for the next couple of days,” Colvin wrote.
Suspicious, Davis did a little investigating. Did he hire a PI? No. Did he grill Colvin’s co-workers? No.
Instead, he did what more and more employers are doing: he let Colvin incriminate himself via the wonders of modern technology.
A couple of clicks on his computer took Davis to Colvin’s Facebook page, where he found pictures of his supposedly home-bound employee whooping it up at a Halloween party in Worcester, Massachusetts. The photos showed Colvin frolicking about in a fairy costume, holding a magic wand in one hand and a beer in the other.
Once his “investigation” was complete, Davis responded to Colvin’s email, saying: “Thanks for letting us know — hope everything is ok in New York.” He then attached one of the incriminating pictures (below), added the words “cool wand” as a postscript and bcc’d the rest of the office.
Davis isn’t alone in his use of the Internet as a sort of employee polygraph device. According to the Washington Post, employers are increasingly using sites like Facebook and MySpace to obtain information on employees and job candidates. In fact, according to the Post, 82 percent of employers say that negative information found online about an applicant would influence their hiring decision.
