I am involved heavily with Human Resources and do a great deal of recruiting out of college for my company. I often speak at local colleges about what their students need to do to compete and I am often asked this question. My advice is to never friend your coworkers.

From an HR perspective, Facebook and Social Media is a still a bit of a wild frontier and the law and most HR policies have not done a good job keeping up. An employee who says disparaging remarks about a coworker at work can be disciplined. But what if they say disparaging things about a coworker at home on their Facebook page? Discipline becomes much more difficult.

By friending a coworker you create two problems:

1) You may learn to much. What do you do if an employee bad mouths your boss on Facebook, do you tell your boss? What if they talk about how excited they are to get a new job- are you obligated to tell your boss he is leaving? What if your boss finds out you knew and you did nothing, do you want to risk your relationship with your boss? What about when coworkers state things that are racist, sexist or homophobic? At what point is it severe enough to inform your boss? Is it ever appropriate to do so?

2) Your Coworkers may learn too much about you. You may be thinking of getting a new job and trying to find the right time to tell a boss when someone you know blabs about it on your facebook wall informing all your coworkers.

When it comes to our personal and our work lives, ignorance is bliss. As a general rule, I only friend a coworker if they are a genuine friend. Someone I trust and someone who I know to discreet. Someone I would still be friends with regardless of where I worked. If a random coworker sends me a friend request I usually just say thanks, but as a general rule I don't "friend" coworkers but that I would love to connect on LinkedIn.