How to Use Social Media to Monitor Prospective Employees
In August 2009, Careerbuilder.com conducted an interesting survey about hiring practices and using social media. Forty-five percent of employers said they used social media to research potential employees and 34 percent used that data to make a decision not to hire someone. Key pieces of information included:
Drinking/drug photos
Displaying poor communication skills
Badmouthing previous employers
Confidential information being shared
Inappropriate photos
Lying about qualifications
Because you cannot ask anything directly about a prospective employee’s social life that touches on age, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, disability status, or personal health information, you will have trouble finding this information without social media. However, social media is not 100 percent accurate. And monitoring for inappropriate activity can easily cross over into spying. As in the case of HP, pretexting, over-aggressive searches, and monitoring could lead to a violation of privacy laws or other protection laws. Case law hasn’t worked out all the details yet regarding what is permissible, but this will definitely make it through the courts in the next few years. In the meantime, do your best to avoid any form of discrimination based on the social media activities of prospective employees.
Recruiting employees is a different matter than actually researching what they do on social media. Social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter can be a unique way of finding candidates, particularly for new media jobs. For example, you can use Twitter with appropriate hashtags for the skills you are looking for. There are actual Twitter job search engines, including Microjobs, TwitJobSearch, and TwitHire, that you can use. See Figure 12-3 for an example of TwitJobSearch. It’s kind of funny that when you search for “social media security” no real jobs are yet out there targeting social media security.
