Another hurdle for job seekers: social media checks

Companies have long used criminal background checks, credit reports and even searches on Google and LinkedIn to probe the lives of prospective employees. Now, some companies are requiring job candidates to pass a social media background check.

According to Jennifer Preston in an article for the New York Times, a company called Social Intelligence scrapes the Internet for everything prospective employees may have said or done online in the past seven years.

Then it assembles a dossier with examples of professional honors and charitable work, along with negative information that meets specific criteria: online evidence of racist remarks or violent activity; references to drugs; sexually explicit photos, text messages or videos.

“We are not detectives,” said Max Drucker, chief executive of the company. “All we assemble is what is publicly available on the Internet.”  The service alarms privacy advocates who say it invites employers to look at information that may not be relevant to job performance.

In Preston’s article, Drucker said his goal was to conduct pre-employment screenings that would help companies meet their obligation to conduct fair and consistent hiring practices while protecting the privacy of job candidates.

For example, he said the reports remove references to information protected under federal employment laws, which companies are not supposed to ask about during interviews. Also, job candidates must first consent to the background check, and they are notified of any adverse information found.

Less than a third of the data surfaced by Mr. Drucker’s firm comes from such major social platforms as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. He said much of the negative information about job candidates comes from deep Web searches that find comments on blogs and posts on smaller social sites, like Tumblr, the blogging site, as well as Yahoo user groups, e-commerce sites, bulletin boards and even Craigslist.

Joe Bontke, outreach manager for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s office in Houston, said he regularly reminds employers and human resource managers about the risks of violating federal antidiscrimination employment rules and laws by using online research in hiring decisions. “Things you can’t ask in an interview are the same things you can’t research,” he said, which includes the gamut of information covering a person’s age, gender, religion, disability, national origin and race.  That said, he added that “75 percent of recruiters are required by their companies to do online research of candidates. And 70 percent of recruiters in the United States report they have rejected candidates because of information online.”