Greg Reynolds, president of Binghamton’s chapter of the world’s oldest professional business fraternity, wasn’t expecting a Cornell University recruiter to friend him on Facebook last school year.

‘That scared the living daylights out of me,’ he said.

But according to the presentation ‘Facebook/Myspace the Right Way,’ the same Web sites that Reynolds, a senior business major, and other college students use for social networking have picked up another purpose: career building.

The Career Development Center and Reynolds’ Alpha Kappa Psi hosted the lecture, which was given twice on campus Monday.

‘I’m not here to tell you to get off Facebook and Myspace,’ said Erin Jennings, a career counselor and peer assistant program coordinator at the CDC. ‘I’m here to tell you how to do it right.’

Seventy-five percent of recruiters use search engines to find information about candidates, according to a 2005 survey of 102 executive recruiters by ExecuNet, an executive job search and networking organization. Twenty-six percent of recruiters have denied candidates because of information found online.

‘This is a new and exciting time in the history of the world,’ Jennings told the crowd of about 50 students during one of the sessions. ‘We’re all online.’

But some companies are taking a step further than Googling, Jennings said. Employers have started to use social networking sites to find out about potential employees.

‘They are going in there for the reason of finding the best candidates for the company,’ Jennings said.

Forty percent of employers say they would consider the Facebook profile of a potential employee in their hiring process, according to a 2006 University of Dayton study of 5,000 employers nationwide.

‘They think you’re on there to share information that is accurate about yourself,’ Jennings said. ‘This is becoming part of your identity.’

But for some weekend warriors, their identities as potential employees might not be best reflected in their profiles. In addition to the party photos with the ubiquitous red Solo cup, profiles have been known to have sexually explicit posts by friends, Jennings said. Students enlist themselves in Facebook groups with incriminating names like ‘Blaze it up,’ a reference to marijuana smoking.

A student volunteered to display her Facebook profile on the projector. The page looked innocent until Jennings scrolled down to reveal the ‘stripper name’ application.

Employers also use social networking sites to garner candidates. Ernst & Young LLP, a world-wide accounting firm, was the first company to purchase a Facebook page aimed solely at recruiting. Microsoft Corp. sponsors a ‘Microsoft Student Group’ page with forums about products and a link to its college-recruiting site.

Companies use the sites to contact students. According to Jennings, some of the companies listed on eRecruiting, BU’s job recruiting Web site, have posted Facebook as means to be reached. Reynolds said he used Facebook to network through a friend of a friend to get a job.

But for the job seekers, Jennings offered a few tips to clean up their digital dirt.

Facebook users can use privacy settings to limit what other people can view.

James Mooney, a senior political science major, uses privacy settings because of ‘identity theft,’ he said. ‘I don’t want random people knowing things about me.’

But MySpace users beware. Even after a MySpace profile is changed, a Google search can sometimes bring up links to cached pages ‘ versions of the profile before changes were made.

When a student asked if he should create a second ‘cleaner’ Facebook profile, Jennings said not to. ‘If I was an employer and I found out you had two profiles, I’d think that was sketch,’ she said.

Jennings also advised creating a positive image on social networking sites by putting up photos of family, posting inspirational quotes or displaying places traveled.

But if students don’t want to use Facebook or MySpace as a medium to communicate with recruiters, they can work around it, Jennings said. If friend-requested by a recruiter, a student can say they’d rather communicate by e-mail or can tell the recruiter they’d love to talk about some of their attributes in an interview. Students can also refer recruiters to sites that post more professional profiles, like Linkedin.com.

To prepare for recruiters that do Internet searches on their candidates, Jennings suggested ‘getting good press.’ Try to get included in on-line publications, she said. Publish a Web log of your positive activities.

For the future, Jennings sees more employers using Facebook and MySpace during the hiring process and out on the job.

‘I’m friends with my boss on Facebook,’ she said.