Facebook is big. Just look at the over-inflated asking price on the company’s IPO filing. Despite its size, people still shun the site and the company has reported the near stagnation of account creations in the U.S. This begs the question: why would someone not be part of Facebook, or any other social networking site? After all, wedding invitations, job recommendations, baby pictures and even airplane seating is being done via social networks nowdays. 

Following two articles from The New York Times and San Jose Mercury News describing the process companies take gathering information on a job applicant over the internet, some have fallen into the logic trap and believe they have an answer: if someone isn’t on Facebook/Twitter/Google+/LinkedIn it must be because they regularly drink bottles of marijuana laced vodka while shooting off AK-47s at the American flag after bathing in puppy blood; or just have something normal to hide from employers.

This fear is sensationalist    poppycock and it distracts from the real reasons people abstain from social networking.

Unfortunately for the adherents of this belief, the articles saved their last inches for detailing how most of the information employers gather on prospective employees comes from photo sharing sites, blogs or forum posts and not from Facebook and companies already require background and credit checks just to walk through the door to take the company’s personality test before the interview even starts.

They also remind us that if an employer can’t ask you a question during an interview – “So, are you gay?” – they can’t hold it against you during the hiring process.

But anecdotes and testimony abound where someone didn’t get the job they were aspiring to because of them holding rifles or drinking — something a hospital or finance company didn’t want their employees doing. 

Truth be told, in the ease-of-access digital age where mere seconds can turn a pot-smoking anti-Semitic who sells TVs at Best Buy into an Internet public relations nightmare, it makes sense that employers would want their employees to maintain a blemish free public face. 

But a blemish free face won’t save you since the problem is any footprint of you on the internet; for the same reason you are told to wear a suit or nice clothing to an interview. 

Wearing a suit de-personalizes you to the interviewer and focuses the attention of the interview on the actual interview. Simply having pictures of yourself in pajama pants could dissuade a hiring manager from calling you back. 

Not that employers will worry you will show up to work in PJs, though some of you might, but it gives the researcher a glimpse into who you are, allowing them to make a judgment of you.

If the company had come to find these personal aspects of you later, say after you were hired, it would either face a wrongful termination suit brought on them or mannagement wouldn’t even notice since their core judgement of you has already been made. 

Having any trace of yourself on the Internet takes the prospect of not getting “that job” away from one’s qualifications and places it square in the eye of the beholder. Someone might not find holding an AK-47 and a bottle of Jack as a sign you’re going to assassinate a senator, but one can instead see that you are an enthusiast with a taste for timeless liquor, making you a great fit for their company. 

Some companies have obstained from the gut-reaction to photos and instead hired personality experts to analyze what kind of a person makes a duck-face in half their profile photos and what that means for their productivity. You are now just as likely to have that drunken photo of you in the hot-tub land you that job rather than lose it.

Not having a Facebook account does not mean someone is secretly Stalin’s love child plotting a communist resurgence and is afraid of long-term unemployment but, and I know this will sound crazy, that person might have an aversion to being stalked and/or a desire to connect on a genuine personal level with someone.