Facebook came out swinging last week over reports that employers are asking employees and job seekers to turn over their passwords to access individual profiles and their activities on the site.

The company said in a statement it would “take action to protect the privacy and security of our users,” including potentially taking legal action.

Public opinion is clearly with Facebook on this, and many took to social media to condemn such password shakedowns. But it’s time to tone down the hysteria. It turns out, few hiring managers choose to put on their Sherlock Holmes cyber snooping hats.

Yes, it's disturbing to hear that some hiring managers are asking for Facebook passwords from job candidates. And in this tough economy, saying no to such a request may mean you don’t end up landing the gig because there are still so many people out there looking for work.

But in reality, Big Brother has not taken over the workplace.

“It’s overblown,” said Jason Morris, president of EmployeeScreenIQ, an employee-screening company, about the recent uproar over social media prowling. “I’ve never come across an employer that asked for passwords or anything as invasive as that.”

A recent study by his company found that many companies are not rushing to the Web or any place else to look you up.

The study, which polled 650 HR professionals nationwide, found:

• 52 percent say they never consult these sites as part of their screening process.
• 48 percent of respondents said they did use such sites, but of those only 9 percent say they always do.

“Despite the potential they might hold,” the report stated, “social networking websites are not yet widely accepted as trusted background-checking resource.”

Of those hiring managers using the Web to screen candidates, Morris said, they’re mainly just Googling applicants. “They don’t really even know what they’re looking for,” he added, “they’re just doing it.”

Mining a job applicant’s social networking sites can pose a legal liability for employers, especially when it comes to bias in hiring. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and the rest, often provide a picture of a job seeker, including race, religion, disability, etc., and if a hiring manager decides not to offer someone a job after perusing such sites they could face charges of discrimination.

Workers aren't out of the woods yet, however. The researchers said, "We anticipate that the trend of those who utilize these sites as a screening tool will only increase in the coming years."

In the end, Facebook may not have to fight to hard even if this practice becomes widespread because there are movements afoot on the federal and state level to introduce new laws to curb such behavior.

“Maryland and Illinois are already well along in considering proposed bills to regulate this practice,” said Daniel Prywes, an employment attorney for Bryan Cave.  “The proposed bills would broadly prohibit employers from seeking access to private areas of social media accounts, with no exceptions for law enforcement or similar sensitive types of employment.”

So let’s all take a deep breath and realize not every job will hinge on your cyber persona.  

If you think just keeping your Facebook page free of drunken photos will help you land a job, think again.

Facebook facts that make you look worldly and popular may say more about you to a hiring manager than anything else. Photos of your trip to Bali; status updates on how much you enjoyed reading “War and Peace”; and thousands of Facebook friends apparently translate into a job candidate who will do better on the job.

At least those are the findings of a new study by a trio of universities that looked at how Facebook profiles predict job success.

“We came up with a Facebook personality score and that correlates with job performance,” said Donald Kluemper, a management professor at Northern Illinois University, who, along with researchers at Auburn University and the University of Evansville, conducted the study that appeared in the recent issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

The researchers looked at five personality traits among Facebook users, including conscientiousness, emotional stability, agreeableness, extraversion and openness. The traits are known as the “Big Five” in psychological lingo and are often used in organizational studies, Kluemper said.

The Facebook users, 56 total, were given a personality score by independent evaluators and six months later those ratings were compared to evaluations completed by the supervisors who the users worked for. And guess what? The higher the Facebook personality score the higher the job performance rating by supervisors.

So what gets you a high personality rating exactly?

Here’s how Kluemper broke it down:

Conscientiousness: This is someone who appears to be well organized and hard-working, and that’s reflected in the way they set up their Facebook page. Maybe there are a lot of detailed posts and profile, or photos of the person working hard at something.

Emotional stability: You seem to be someone who looks at the glass as half full, and seem able to handle stress. That means your page is lacking lots of negative and down in the dumps type posts; and you’re not overly emotional in images or in what you write.

Agreeableness: This is all about someone who’s able to get along and doesn’t engage in Facebook conflicts, especially heated debates with friends.

Extraversion: Here’s where lots of Facebook friends come in handy because lots of friends is a predictor of extraversion. Also, photos of you in social situations with lots of people are a good thing, compared to pictures of you alone on your couch.

Openness: Travel and intellect play into this category. If you appear open to different experiences and viewpoints, then you’re viewed as open. If you’re posting stuff about classic literature you’ll probably score higher than if you’re dishing about the latest trashy novel. And photos of international travel are also a big plus.

Based on this research, scoring high in all these categories means you’re more likely to be an ideal employee. That kind of predictor would probably make any hiring manager salivate, especially in today’s tough job market where they have to weed through thousands of applicants.

Kluemper is not advocating that HR use his groundbreaking social-media research just yet. “This is one study and the sample size is not that large,” he explained. “A lot more studies need to be done.”

But, he admitted some ill-advised HR folks may try and hang their hats on this one study, and that worries him because using such personality tests could be on sketchy legal grounds.

Red Tape Chronicles: When it comes to online reputation, 'life's not fair, and companies aren't either'

Indeed, personality tests and a host of other pre-employment screenings, including everything from criminal to credit background checks, have come under fire when used in the hiring process because of privacy issues and also because some impact certain groups adversely. Social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn have even made the problem biggerbecause so much information is now available online that the job seekers themselves put out there.

“We’re not advocating employers use this technique,” Kluemper said about the Facebook ratings.

Unfortunately, it may be hard to put the Facebook personality cat back in the hiring bag.

And speaking about cats, if you want to put those adorable videos of kittens on your Facebook page - a popular pastime for many users - keep in mind what you may be projecting into cyber space.

Research by University of Texas at Austin psychologist Sam Gosling found that "dog people are more extraverted, more agreeable and more conscientious than self-described cat people."  

It’s college graduation season, which means many young hopefuls are out there trying to snag their first real job.

Here’s a little piece of advice, courtesy of some managers who have apparently seen it all: Don’t let Mom and Dad be part of the process.

A recent survey of managers, conducted by the temp service OfficeTeam, found that managers have witnessed everything from a parent who wanted to sit in on an interview to one who called afterward to find out why their offspring didn’t get the job.

We’re going to go out on a limb and guess that these techniques didn’t necessarily work out so well for the candidate.

Of course parents want to help their kids get the right start in life, and experts say Mom and Dad can and should talk to their kids about career goals, resume writing and interview etiquette. But they should draw the line at things like attending job interviews, negotiating salaries or pressuring pals to give their kids a job.

“It’s important for the teen or young adult to find her own job. If a parent stays out of it, kids learn the difficulty of finding a job, an important discovery," Susan Smith Kuczmarski, author of “The Sacred Flight of the Teenager: A Parent’s Guide to Stepping Back and Letting Go," told msnbc.com career columnist Eve Tahmincioglu in a story on this subject last year.

Here’s what some of the managers said when they were asked about unusual parental behavior.

• "One parent wanted to sit in during the interview."
• "A parent called a politician to push me to hire his son."
• "A mother submitted her daughter's resume on her behalf."
• "A parent called during the interview to try to push me to hire her daughter."
• "A parent came by my desk and told me that he expected his daughter to get preference for a position since he was a manager at the company."
• "A parent called to find out why we did not hire her son and why we felt he was not qualified."

The OfficeTeam survey is based on interviews with more than 1,300 senior managers in the U.S. and Canada, conducted earlier this year.