A tutor responsible for admissions at Cambridge University has admitted that he checks out applicants' personal pages on Facebook.

Dr Richard Barnes, senior tutor at Emmanuel College, said that the site was recommended as a good source of information by contacts who work in Cambridge.

"This has been the year in which I joined Facebook," Dr Barnes wrote in the college magazine.

"I have to confess that I actually joined to see what I was missing and to check up (discreetly) on applicants for a college position. I had been alerted to the value of this by some of our members in the city."

However, a spokesman for Cambridge University dismissed Dr Barnes's comment as a "throwaway line".

A UK poll of more than 2,000 consumers and 600 employers in 2007 found that a quarter of employers have rejected job applicants after discovering "dodgy" personal information about them on the web.

The poll by business social network firm Viadeo found that UK bosses increasingly checked the "internet reputations" of job applicants based on their postings across blogs, forums and other web 2.0 sites.