Wrongful dismissal advice in the age of social media.

1) Employers search social media when hiring, to learn more about prospective candidates than what typically comes across from a standard interview, resume, and cover letter. Therefore smart job-seekers will want to improve their linked-in and Facebook profiles to come across as more stable, social, and connected over all.

On the other hand, racy photos, inflammatory political comments, weird interests, too many typos, and bathroom humour may deprive you of the white-shoe accounting firm job you otherwise stood to land. So long as employer's not breaching human rights law, companies can and will lawfully discriminate against job candidates based on their social media profile and affiliations.

2) Employees get fired for social media comments where disparaging bosses, and/or threatening co-workers. Unfortunately, employees typically don't spend the kind of time/attention proofreading their Facebook status updates as they do their resumes and cover letters.

In our practice, we've seen a significant post-2010 increase in employees terminated because of social media complaints about their employers, co-workers, suppliers, customers, and other workplace contacts.

Too many employees believe these comments are just circulating among friends, however don't realize how often their work "friends" will turn these comments over to their employer for political gain. We've also seen an increasing number of cases where the employer intentionally planted co-workers to befriend these employees in the first place for specific purpose of digging up ammunition to then terminate these loose-lipped employees for just cause without severance.

3) On the other hand, employers are more vulnerable than ever to disgruntled employees looking to disparage their employers on-line. Whereas a terminated employee will have previously told a handful of acquaintances about their company's underhanded dealings, that same terminated employee will now magnify those disparaging allegations exponentially through Google review, Yelp, Facebook, and endless other social media websites appealing to these unemployed complainers with much free time on their hands. For this reason, employers are sometimes better paying off a terminated employee with a nuisance value severance package than investing hundreds of thousands in having to defend their former top-100 employer reputations on-line.

4) Social media can magnify the emotional/reputational effects of termination. Whereas a terminated employee would have previously had some time to transition to their next job before explaining to friends/family about their workplace change, it's now far more difficult to keep embarrassing terminations under wraps when their Facebook friends have grown accustomed to their daily status updates about day-to-day goings-on at work.

5) Finally, social media turns employment lawyers into on-line detectives. Employees are constantly coming across re-postings of their former positions as evidence that their jobs were not in fact getting outsourced as alleged by their boss. On the other side, employers are consistently searching employees' Linked-in and/or Facebook profiles to discover that mentally distressed employee has actually been partying in Vegas or landed an even higher-status/pay job within just a few weeks of termination.

Either way, social media has certainly made the employment law field more high-stakes, explosive, and fortunately/unfortunately lining the pockets of lawyers on both sides.