Recruiters snooping on your social media

According to recent new Career Builder survey of nearly 2,200 hiring managers and more than 3,000 workers, 60% of employers vet job candidates’ social media pages. That’s up from 52% last year, and stands in sharp contrast to the mere 11% who checked out profiles a decade ago.

According to a survey of 300 company recruiters, 91% of British employers check job applicants' social media profiles. Another poll showed that in the US, 66% of employers monitor their employees' internet browsing and about a third has fired workers for internet misuse.

One of the biggest challenges the organizations are facing today is being able to retain talent in a day and age where employees think nothing of changing jobs within months of joining a new organization.

Now days, the HR professionals and hiring managers are under tremendous pressure to hire the right candidates and to ensure the employees to stick to the organization as long as possible.

The proliferation of hiring portals employing data to find the “right fit” is a testament to the renewed focus at organizations trying to minimize the chances of a “false positive”, mis-hire.

However, a more recent trend both during pre and post hiring is the tendency to make use of social media data about candidates and employees.

Today, many of the organizations are making use of social media profiles about individuals that was akin to snooping on them and simply not cricket. As a result, many employees announced that they would refrain from joining or consider leaving organizations that would do that. However, this denouncement was selective.

HR professionals and hiring managers have stated the following five reasons for checking out candidates on social media.

To find any red flags
In a perfect world, you would only find positive things when you looked at a potential employee’s social media pages. Unfortunately, there will be times when you find red flags.

For example, you may find that a candidate lied on their resume, uses social media to bully people, or routinely bad mouths previous employers and coworkers.

Hiring managers have even found evidence of drug use, stealing, and the disclosure of confidential information about customers.

While it’s always disappointing to find such things, it’s worlds

better than accidentally hiring someone who engages in unsavory, unethical, or even illegal behavior.

To assess their written communication skills
To assess a potential hire’s writing and communication skills and asking yourself the following questions about their social media presence:

• When they write posts, how clearly do they communicate the points they are trying to make?
• Does the candidate use proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation (taking into consideration that social media communication is, by nature, casual)?
• How do they conduct themselves if somebody criticizes what they have written or offers an opposing view?
• If a conversation turns contentious, how do they conduct themselves?
• Are they able to engage in written exchanges that are thoughtful, interesting, and courteous?

The answers to each of these questions may give you an idea of how effective they will be communicating with co-workers and customers.

To learn about their ambitions
Whom a potential candidate follows in a personal sense shouldn’t really matter. However, the people and entities that they follow and who follow them for professional reasons can lead you to some really important information.

First, if you have a candidate who is being followed by influencers in your industry, and they are engaging in conversations with them, that’s a pretty big deal. When you learn which people and companies a potential hire is following, that can also give you some great insight into that person’s goals and ambitions. Here are a few examples:

If a candidate is following a lot of brands in a particular region, they may have a long term goal of seeking employment in that region.
If they follow several companies that are in a very specific niche, it could be likely that’s where they would like to work in the future.

Following multiple companies with similar cultures might be an indication of the work environment a candidate is seeking.

To determine cultural fit
The overall tone of a person’s social media posts are often a great insight into their real-life personality. A person who continually cracks jokes and attempts to turn conversations into funny banter might be a great fit for a customer service role where they often need to de-escalate tense situations. However, if you maintain a serious, task oriented, work environment, they may not be a great fit.

Two caveats to this
First, keep in mind that many people are bit bolder when posting on social media, while they may be much more reserved in real life.

Second, you should never judge somebody by a single social media post. After all, everybody has days where they are moodier than usual, or just a bit off for one reason or another. Remember to consider things in context rather than a vacuum.

To learn about a candidate’s creativity and curiosity
If you want a candidate who is a creative problem solver, who can think outside of the box, and who will approach difficult situations in a thoughtful manner, you may want to check out what they post on social media. Are the posts that they write and share funny, thoughtful, and informative?

If they are, you are likely looking at a great prospect. If you are in a niche where a talent for art or design is key, see if your prospect is on Pinterest or Tumblr. Both platforms are frequently used for showcasing creative work.

But the contention of employees is that the organizations digging into more personal social media like Face book or Twitter and using that to prejudice their decision making, they were fine with and even expected organizations to look at more professional media such as LinkedIn and Github.

The reasoning was that candidates and employees expected the “working world” to look into these media and that the employees were also presenting themselves to their organizations in a more professional manner.

A further probing into whether it was alright for organizations to make use of company emails to identify employee flight risk brought about some confused silence. While employees understand that company emails belong to the company to do with as it pleases, there was also some unease over the fact that those could be used to track and monitor their activities.

This dilemma is going accentuate as technology pervades every aspect of our lives. A country like the US where individual freedoms have been historically prized has had to compromise on those in the name of national security. CCTV cameras in malls and streets now attest to our every movement.

A decade or two down the road, we seem to have made peace with the fact that social media companies can trawl through all our data and pop-up advertisements based on insights from their algorithms.

Is this too then a passing phase? Will the next generation of employees, a decade from now, find social media profiling acceptable?

Are the arguments of the current generation and their attitudes against this practice simply the last flaring of the candle flame? Are we raging against the dying of the light?

As always with ethical questions, there are grey areas and we seem to be treading ever closer to them.