Guess who's looking at your Web page: college-admissions officials and employers are starting to check out candidates on Web sites like Facebook and MySpace.

• Author: Finder, Alan
• Position: Cover story

One recent university graduate may still be wondering why she didn't get a job offer from Green Ivy Educational Consulting, which teaches organizational skills to high school students in the San Francisco area. Ana Homayoun, who runs the company, thought the young woman was a promising candidate--until she looked her up on Facebook, the popular social-networking site. There, Homayoun found commentary about the student's drinking and smoking habits, including testimonials from friends, and pictures.

"I was just shocked by the amount of stuff that she was willing to publicly display," says Homayoun. "When I saw that, I thought, 'OK, so much for that.'"

Many companies have been using search engines like Google and Yahoo to conduct background checks on jobseeking college seniors for some time. But now, college career counselors and other experts say, recruiters are starting to look up applicants on sites like Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, and Friendster, where high school and college students often post provocative photographs and text in what some mistakenly believe is relative privacy.

When viewed by corporate recruiters or admissions officials at colleges and graduate schools, such pages can make students look immature and unprofessional, at best.

"It's a growing phenomenon," says Michael Sciola, director of the career resource center at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. "There are lots of employers that Google. Now, they've taken the next step."

At New York University, recruiters from about 30 companies told career counselors that they were looking at the sites, says Trudy G. Steinfeld, executive director of the school's career development center.

"The term they've used over and over is 'red flags,'" Steinfeld says. "Is there something about their lifestyle that we might find questionable or that we might find goes against the core values of our corporation?"

HOW PRIVATE?

Facebook and MySpace are only two years old, but they've attracted millions of avid participants who mingle online by sharing personal information, often intended to show how funny, cool, or outrageous they are. Concerns have already been raised about these and other Internet sites, including their potential misuse by stalkers and students exposing their own misbehavior.

On MySpace and similar sites, personal pages are generally available to anyone who registers, with few restrictions on who can join. To register on Facebook, high school students must have a school...