Some Things for Employers to Follow When Conducting Social Media Searches

Many employers are conducting social media background checks.  As these background searches are relatively new for employment screening purposes, certain employers are unwittingly violating the rights of their employment candidates.  A good many are requesting applicant passwords, a no-no, and are marking as negatives questionable areas of privacy.

Now social media background checks can reveal quite a bit about a candidate’s personality and behavior patterns.  It can help determine if he is a good fit for a certain workplace environment.  But then social media searches can produce overkill and in the course of it cause the rejection of candidates for certain idiosyncrasies that would not impede the performance of the job.  The more eccentric types with otherwise impeccable skill sets can be moved aside for a lesser candidate who happens to be more plain vanilla and better behaved.

I have written about social media searches before.  One such article is entitled,  Social Media Background Checks Revisited.

Now Michael Nader in an article on ERE.Net offers some good tips for employers when conducting social media searches.  I will just post a couple of them here.  The rest you can find at this link at ERE.Net.

1. Search only public content about the candidate on the Internet: The company should only include a review of social media content that is in the public domain on the Internet. Companies should not require candidates to produce their Facebook username or password, or require them to “friend” the company, or require them to log onto their Facebook site and allow the company to “shoulder surf” through their site during an interview. Moreover, a great source for candidates may be internal referrals from current employees. If the referring employee is a “friend” of the candidate on Facebook, do not make a “backdoor” attempt to review the candidate’s non-public content through the referring employee’s “friend” status with the candidate. Always respect the candidate’s privacy settings that cover their online content.
2. Separate the social media researcher from the decision-maker. A designated company researcher should review public content on social sites to scrub comments about protected categories and activities about candidates before providing it to the decision-maker.