So Much for 'Personal' Habits

Companies that ban off-hours smoking believe it is in their right to fire employees who smoke because they are increasing company health-care costs. But "it's a road that leads to somewhere that not all of us are going to like," Maltby said. "It sounds good when you talk about it in the context of smoking. But how about people who drink, ride motorcycles, sky-dive, have a promiscuous sex life?"

Or use the Internet?

A simple Google search has made uncovering someone's personal life that much easier. Blogs and pages on social-networking sites such as MySpace are an invitation to your innermost thoughts and private actions.

Brad Karsh, a career consultant and author of "Confessions of a Recruiting Director," was recently about to interview a young man for an internship. Karsh checked him out on the Web site Facebook, where the potential employee listed among his interests "smokin' blunts with the homies, shooting caps into whitie."

"I'm assuming, and 99 percent certain, that he was joking. But what did that say about his judgment?" Karsh said. "And what did that say about someone applying for a job at a company that advises college students about the workplace?"

Karsh did not hire the man.

In a recent survey, 19 percent of workers said they would post their résumés on social networking sites, while a third would remove content from their MySpace, Facebook or Friendster pages if they knew their employers could see it, according to Spherion, a recruitment and staffing agency.

Checking online profiles has become a regular part of the hiring process. Rex Houlihan, founder of NorthStar Express Freight Inc. in Falls Church, didn't even think of checking potential employees online until a young woman at his firm introduced him to it. She "was just trying to get a good feel for who they were and if they would be a good fit," he said. It worked: "We saw somebody who had content on a Web site that were frightening. I looked at it and said, 'There's no way we're moving forward with this individual.' " He said the site included "racist, derogatory material."

His employees, mostly recent college grads, often check sites for him. "I think if you're making all that information public, if an employer sees it, that's sort of your own problem," said Christine Glynn, 25, a customer care specialist at NorthStar, a convention and trade show shipping company.

But not all young ones are full of bad judgment. Her colleague Laura Silverman, 23, said she is on Facebook but limits who can see her profile -- and the information in it. "There is no personal information on there at all because I know people who are looking can find it," she said.

"I believe our personal lives are no longer personal," said Steven Jungman, a recruiter with ChaseCom LP, based in Houston. "It's more and more difficult to leave work at the office and more and more difficult to separate personal from business."

Jungman said he recently had to fire someone he placed in a call center job because the company said her haircut was "distracting."