There’s nothing new about background checks in professional recruiting. Organizations have conducted them for decades to ensure that their prospective hires do indeed have the qualifications they list on their resumes; a small industry arose to meet the needs of organizations looking to make better hiring decisions, while also allowing them to keep within the bounds of federal antidiscrimination regulations.
Then the web opened up a wide range of new ways to obtain information about other people – and for HR recruiters to check out job candidates. It kept the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission busy, making sure that employers and their HR staff understood where the line was when it came to using online research in evaluating prospective employees. Basically, it’s the same line you can’t cross when you interview a candidate: You can’t ask them about their “race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information,” among other things.
But social media have opened up a whole new landscape for background checks, as millions of us joined Facebook, started blogs, and began Tweeting our passing moods and fancies, positive and negative — putting all this information out on the Internet with little thought as to what it says about us; certainly with little forethought as to what it might say about us to a prospective employer.
Where background checks formerly focused on criminal history or credit history, and (more recently) on checking LinkedIn and possibly Googling a job candidate just to see what it turned up, an employer can now request that their prospective employees undergo a social media background check through the services of a firm known as Social Intelligence. As reported in the New York Times, the company uses sophisticated search technology to crawl the deep web, turning up “everything [the job candidate] has said or done online in the past seven years”. Recognize that such a search will turn up some good stuff – the candidate’s charitable work for Children’s Memorial Hospital, or mention of academic honors, or of his/her membership on the crew of the runner-up of the 2006 Race to Mackinac, for instance – but potentially some pretty unsavory items as well.
And just what might those unsavory items include? Well, posts to E-Bay and/or Craigslist for products and/or services that you might prefer no one else knew about; any sexually explicit photos or videos you might have been indiscreet enough to have posted (or been tagged in) on image-sharing sites; blog posts (or comments to blog posts) that provide evidence of certain “parochial” attitudes or pastimes (e.g. “weekend warrior” activities with organizations other than the National Guard); e-commerce sites where you’ve posted comments or customer reviews; or Yahoo user groups you’ve joined.
What Social Intelligence does is to compile all this information on the prospective employee in question; sift it according to the applicable employment regulations; categorize it according to a predetermined set of criteria, specified in advance by the client organization; and then present it to the client in the form of a report on the prospective employee. As for privacy concerns, a spokesman for Social Intelligence points out that all they are doing is compiling, categorizing, and putting into digestible format information on individuals that’s “publicly available on the Internet today”. And, similar to the way credit and reference checks have been handled in the past, the job candidate must first agree to the background check; the prospective employer must inform the candidate of any untoward findings.
The way I see it, the only thing that should be at all surprising about this is that it took this long for someone to make a business out of it. (According to the Times article, Social Intelligence has been around for a year.)
And in the wake of Weinergate, it should be pretty clear that there are people are making some dubious judgments about the information they post about themselves online – and equally clear that far too many of them are woefully misinformed about the availability, and the accessibility, of that information.
According to the Times, Social Intelligence has undergone some scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission. But it goes on to report that 75 percent of recruiters are required by their employers to do online research of job candidates. It’s clear that there’s a market for these services; this third-party approach may well be the wave of the future, given how it reduces employers’ exposure to risk in the hiring process.
So the next time you’re tempted to post a somewhat questionable comment to a somewhat questionable blog, you just might want to think twice. That comment’s going to be out there, and subject to deep web search, for a long, long time — and subject to potential reporting to prospective employees for seven years. So do you really want to post it? Maybe not.