A third of HR professionals and managers confess to searching through employees' social networking profiles for information on their background and 24% are not impressed with what they find.

A study of 961 HR professionals and managers by global recruitment website yasni.co.uk found 32% of managers and HR personnel use sites such as Facebook and MySpace as recruitment tools as they believe this saves time, money and gives them a more fuller picture of applicants.

A fifth admitted the information they found about candidates put them off employing them and the biggest turn-offs were drunken photographs (47%) and rude comments (22%).

And although 68% of recruiters said they had not searched for applicants online, 44% of these said they probably would do in the future.

Lisette Howlett, founder of UK recruitment scoring website HireScores.com, said: "What is fundamental here is dealing with findings intelligently. Recruiters should appreciate a social networking site is just that - social, and therefore language and attitudes are inevitably more relaxed."