WASHINGTON — Some students worried about how their online presence will be perceived by a potential employer are taking the extraordinary security step of changing their names on the social network Facebook.

In this down economy, with heavy competition for jobs, college students and new graduates are among those joining an emerging national trend of modifying account names to elude snooping recruiters.

"I had an internship that required me to do it because I worked for a politician, and I couldn't be associated with any kind of organization," said Emily Winchatz, a Capitol Hill intern and senior government and philosophy major at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Andrew Noyes, public policy communications manager in Facebook's Washington, D.C., office, couldn't comment on this specific trend, but said information security is a "top priority" and the company constantly works to improve its systems for users.

Launched from a Harvard dorm room in February 2004, Facebook began as a way of linking students at the country's most elite universities, but quickly expanded by connecting workplaces, high schools and, now the public, through by-the-second status updates, multimedia and "wall" posts.

"Online Reputation in a Connected World," a January report commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by Cross-Tab Marketing Services, noted 75 percent of recruiters said their companies had formal policies that required human resources teams to research applicants online and 63 percent had visited candidates' social networking sites before making any hiring decisions. On the contrary, only 7 percent of Americans surveyed believed information about them online had affected previous job searches, the report states, while 70 percent of U.S. hiring managers said they had eliminated candidates based on what they found.

Sarah Barton, a senior at Stevenson University outside Baltimore, hadn't thought about changing her account name until a law professor recently acknowledged performing client background checks on Facebook.

Although she opted to merely adjust the viewer settings for her photos — partly because her middle name is so uncommon it could actually draw more attention to her page — the 21-year-old paralegal studies major said she knew of friends who had altered their names during job searches.

Jackie Sauter, web content manager at American University's Kogod School of Business, had a few extra tips to stay under the radar: adjust your privacy settings to remove profiles from searches, create a second page for professional contacts and restrict access to photos, as they can be "some of the most damning evidence on Facebook to a potential employer."