Facebook Limited Access Lists for Job Seekers

By Joshua Waldman from Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies

As a job seeker, creating "Limited Access" lists is your best defense against recruiters, bosses, or other professionals who want to friend you on Facebook but who you don’t really know personally. Using lists in Facebook is one of the most misunderstood yet powerful tools for the modern networker. By grouping certain friends together into a list, you can assign specific privacy settings to only that list.

Talk about an awkward situation! If you ignore a recruiter or boss's request to friend you, you may either offend them or signify that you have something to hide. If you accept their request, they now have penetrated all the work you’ve done with your privacy settings to make sure only your friends get access to your personal life.

Accept such friend requests (so they don’t get offended) but with a caveat: Create a “Limited Access” list of individuals and put recruiters and other professionals you don’t know personally on this list so they can’t see everything in your profile. Here’s how:

Click on the Account tab at the top of the page.
Click on Edit Friends from the drop-down menu.
Click on the Create a List button and name the new list “Limited Access.”
Scroll through your Friends list and add anyone to your Limited Access list who you may want to restrict certain information from.
Return to your Privacy Settings page and click on Customize Settings.
Go through the list of Things You Share, pick the Customize option from the drop-down menu, and add your Limited Access list under the “Hide this from” section.

This step allows you to pick and choose what you want to exclude these people from. For example, you might not want recruiters and other strangers to know who your friends are, what your religious views are, or when your birthday is.

When you have to add someone to your Facebook network that you really don’t want to add, simply drop them into your Limited Access list. This way you avoid offending the person while still protecting your private information.