Employers working for small businesses in IT should not use the likes of Facebook and Twitter when vetting a potential job candidate for a post at their company, it has been stated.

Dan Hawes, the co-founder of the Graduate Recruitment Bureau, said that it was not exactly fair on a person to plumb somebody's personal life, although people are not aware of just how much information they are putting into the public domain.

He continued: "That's what they should bear in mind. In terms of recruiting using it as a deciding factor, that's pretty short-sighted, at the foremost they should interview someone and make a decision on that and their CV."

Mr Hawes concluded that traditional methods should always be used in the marketplace as otherwise hobbies and career issues will be mixed in an unprofessional way, meaning that employers will often lose sight of what is vital for the job they are applying to.

Following Twitter's jump into the job market, Nielsen stated that unique visitors to Twitter have increased by 1,382 per cent year-on-year, making it the fastest growing social networking site in the world.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were guaranteed response times and allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues.