This article sprung out of a conversation a colleague and I had at the pub; we were talking about all the stupid things we had done at university and how glad we are that social media hadn’t quite dug its claws in yet (yes, I’m that old). Anyway, we both reckoned pretty confidently that we would struggle to get jobs if our employers could see photos of us from that time.
The above is, in fact, a total lie. I’m writing this article to accompany the launch of our new social media check on the co-ordinated request of our marketing and product teams.
In a nutshell, the above is the main reason why employers choose to examine the social media profiles of their prospective employees: people lie. Even worse, most candidates get better at interviewing after a few years on the job: people learn what to say in interviews, how to work a panel and how to navigate a process. For these reasons, background checks in general are on the rise and one of the most requested checks that our clients ask for is a social media check. It makes sense given that this is the one space in which candidates are ostensibly honest about themselves and share things that otherwise would never come up during a typical interview process.
All of this sounds like good enough justification for scrolling through Facebook and Instagram at work, only to do the same thing on the tube, the sofa and at the pub whilst your friend is in the loo. However, if we look a little deeper, there are actually a multitude of reasons why employers might consider running background checks on their employees, and also a decent amount of best practices that should be considered before diving straight in.
The Ugly
Let’s start at the bottom of the barrel and be realistic, a lot of people set their socials to private to prevent their employers (and any undesirables) from snooping around. Unscrupulous employers have been known to create fake accounts, befriend prospective candidates, snoop on their social media profiles and then reject them, rescind their job offers or even fire them. This is horrible practice and illegal. If you’re going to run social media checks on your candidates make sure you do it through a reputable provider and if they set their socials to private, please don’t try and find a workaround.
The other side of this is equally ugly, people post the most ludicrous and offensive things on their socials for all the world to see. However, what you should do if you come across this type of material is less straightforward, especially if you’ve already made a formal job offer or the employee has joined the company and your background checks have taken extra time to complete. UK employment and labour laws offer protection against employers discriminating against candidates and employees. Now this article is not a treatise on the Equality Act 2010 but as a lawyer, I can say comfortably, discrimination is illegal. Don’t do it. More seriously, you need to ensure that as a company you’ve put good policies in place making it clear that you don’t and won’t tolerate offensive, racist, homophobic, sexist (or any other type of ‘-ist’) behaviour, even if it is on social media. Further, these policies need to be clearly communicated throughout the recruitment process and during onboarding. If you can manage this then you’re in a much better position to take decisive action if your new hire does turn out to be ‘the worst’.
One other point runs through this section: delayed background checks can cause further complications if the candidate has already taken up their position. To avoid this, you might consider using a background checking provider that is famous for its speedy turnaround times
The Good
Most employers don’t want to catch their employees out or uncover horror stories from the past. Typically, People and Talent teams across the country are running social media checks as part of a co-ordinated background checking programme designed to minimise risk to their business. The mitigation of risk to the business makes a lot of sense, especially for senior hires. Companies are increasingly struggling - ironically thanks to the rise of social media - to disassociate themselves in the eyes of the public from their executive and leadership teams. If one of your employees is a closet racist and gets outed whilst on the job, it is highly likely that people will assume you’re all closet racists, which you’re not (hopefully).
This is where social media checks step in and form a sensible addition to a background checking programme designed to minimise risk. You wouldn’t hire someone on the financial sanctions watchlist to be your accountant anymore than you would hire a racist to be your CEO. The rub here is that there isn’t a verifiable catalogue of racists - much to the chagrin of Reddit users worldwide. Social media acts as an unverified catalogue that, when used proportionately and sensibly, is a useful tool in risk mitigation. The point about the catalogue being unverified is however important. A good deal of social media is fiction and an even greater portion is produced by children. It isn’t a verified source of truth, and whilst helpful, it should also be taken with a pinch of salt.
This is where proportionality comes front and centre. Pictures from freshers week should probably be deleted or made private. However, candidates may have valid but personal reasons for keeping these photos around, reasons that aren’t really a concern of their employers. One of the most common pieces of feedback we receive is a fear that employers are going to trawl through every single post and picture from time immemorial despite the lack of relevance to the job applied for or even to the candidate’s behaviour today. People grow up and mature; that isn’t a certainty in life, but it is something we should hope for. That is why Zinc, for example, only flags problematic posts, not an entire profile. This ensures the check is relevant and a proportionate method of achieving the desired outcome: risk mitigation.
The Bad
We’ve talked about the two extreme ends of the spectrum so this final section should probably be titled ‘The Middle’ or ‘The Average’ but that isn’t really as catchy.
Most hiring managers and Talent folk admit to having a quick check of a candidate’s socials, even if this is just on LinkedIn. In fact, most ATS platforms try to pull social media profiles directly onto a candidate's application. In theory this is fine, but in practice this opens up the door to subconscious (and conscious) bias. You’ve got to critically ask yourself what you’re even doing when you’re looking at social media, what are you trying to uncover at such an early stage?
Few companies have managed to devise a genuinely unbiased approach to screening applicants because it is hard. If you block out too much contextual information, you risk not understanding the candidate fully and if you include everything then subconscious bias can slip in. Social media only amplifies this by presenting material in frames of reference that are either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The intention behind a quick look at a candidate’s socials might not be nefarious, especially if the candidate is progressing to the latter stages of the process, however, this unstructured approach runs the risk of subconscious bias sneaking into the recruitment process.
A better approach would be incorporating sensible, privacy-conscious social media checks into your programme of background checks. This allows for a strong candidate experience where the right to a private life is respected whilst also allowing Talent teams to mitigate risks to a business that otherwise might not be uncovered during a typical recruitment process.
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