Searching a Job Candidate’s Social Media: Risk v. Reward

Recently, I spoke to a group of HR professionals and business decision makers on the use of social media in the hiring process. As usual, the thought of gathering social media information on an applicant to use in the hiring process gives some hiring managers a sense of hesitancy. Specifically, HR Pros and other hiring managers wonder if they are gathering information in the proper way which maximizes reward and minimizes legal risk. My contention is that an applicant’s social media footprint can provide valuable insight and perspective on whether the applicant would be a good fit for your company. That is, so long as that information is collected in the right way. It is important to understand that using social media in the hiring process is a risk v. reward proposition.

The reward for searching social media content of job applicants is that you can find “deal breaker” material which can help avoid making a bad hire. The examples are plenty. There was the applicant to a daycare that posted on Facebook: I start my new job today. But I absolutely hate working at day care... Lol, it's all good, I just really hate being around a lot of kids.” Or the applicant to a tech company who tweeted about getting a job offer but then complained about the commute “and hating the work.” Not exactly “Employee of the Month” material. Both of these applicants had their job offers rescinded. The employer dodged a bullet.

However, there is a risk with searching social media content for job applicants. The primary risk is that employers can easily (and inadvertently) learn information they would normally go out of their way to avoid. For example, information about age, disability, pregnancy, or union affiliation. All good HR folks know to avoid asking questions about those topics in an interview, but they could accidentally stumble across this information while searching an applicant’s social media accounts.

So the question is – how do you harness the rewards of an applicant’s social media content while avoiding the legal risk? A good start is to remember these three tips:

1. Be Consistent: Employers can avoid liability by searching the same social media sites for all applicants (and document the searches). Such consistency will help to avoid claims of discriminatory searches (i.e., intense scrutiny/searching for the female candidate, but lax searching for the male candidate).

2. Insulate the Decision-maker: Federal and state laws are clear that certain protected characteristics like race, gender, religion, disability, pregnancy, union affiliation, etc., cannot be considered when making a hiring decision. Therefore, hiring decision-makers should not be conducting the social media searches which could result in inadvertently discovering a protected characteristic. Rather, other staff members should perform the searches and create a report which culls out any information relating to characteristics which are protected by law. This allows the decision-maker to make a hiring determination without any knowledge of protected characteristics.

3. Do Not “Friend” Applicants to Obtain Information. Employers should not friend applicants to obtain their social media information. Similarly, employers should refrain from requesting social media passwords from applicant in order to obtain information.

So get out there and find the good (and the bad) in an applicant’s social media. But make sure that you are doing it right.