Facebook Usage as Social Screening. Exploring the Approach of Admissions Officers from Management Colleges

The online social networks allow individuals to continuously create and model their self-presentations and representations. Facebook stands for a relevant example as people are given the uncensored opportunity to unfold their online selves according to their interests, preferences, goals and expectations. As a social networking site, Facebook is particularly used for reasons related to social documentation (social searching) and maintaining preexisting close relationships (bonding social capital) that imply knowledge of new information about persons met offline, and less for social exploration (social browsing) that refers to using Facebook to initiate new contacts. The extant recent literature often approach the usage of Facebook as a pre-employment screening tool with a view to select the fittest candidates for the job. Still, there are few studies which address the professors’ endeavor to use social media, in general and Facebook, in particular, as a complementary criterion when selecting future students. At this level, Facebook profiles are liable to stand for cogent indicators for the prospects’ personalities and potential, for their predispositions and professional perspectives. Starting from this point, the current research aims at investigating the approaches on the aforementioned issue of several professors from Management colleges in Romania who are in charge of settling the evaluation reference points of the college admissions procedure. The research is the more relevant so as the future graduate managers should possess some key characteristics which may be anticipated or pre-assessed based on their Facebook profile cues. In order to test the subjects’ openness to consider the implications of Facebook usage as a thorough social documentation tool, nineteen in-depth interviews were conducted. The findings show that there is a high degree of skepticism towards using Facebook as a source of reliable information