With all the social media sites available today, it is still critical to verbally validate a potential employee\u2019s past experience with a previous employer.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no denying, however, that a lot can be deduced about someone from a bit of quick searching in the public domain. Facebook, Twitter, and personal blogs can show the entire history of someone\u2019s online \u2018existence\u2019.<\/p>\n
The question is, how much of the information gleaned from social sites should you base your decisions on? How do you strike a balance?<\/p>\n
Phoning previous employers can often be unproductive, as many prefer to give a positive response rather than offer criticism over the phone. This is called the \u2018halo effect\u2019. It also takes hours of time to request the call, find a time that suits, then actually connect with the right person.<\/p>\n
So, where verbal confirmation can\u2019t be relied upon, many employers are now turning to the internet. Social networking sites can \u2018red flag\u2019 undesirable characteristics such as violent tendencies, bad-mouthing previous employers, sexist or racist attitudes or excessive use of social media on company time.<\/p>\n
Recent survey results show just how important social media has become for recruiters and hiring managers. More than 80% of hiring managers plan to recruit through social networks in 2011. Social media reference checking is also becoming much more common: Close to 30% of hiring managers plan to check candidate\u2019s backgrounds on either LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter, in addition to a general Google search.<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s also a downside to these kinds of \u2018character checks\u2019:<\/p>\n
Perhaps a better balance when reference checking would be to hire a third party who would:<\/p>\n
Whether we like it or not, character checking through social media is here to stay, so we need to find a better balance between that and traditional methods of information gathering.<\/p>\n
Perhaps if we rely less on data which is one step removed from the candidate and improve our data gathering from the candidates themselves (i.e. interviewing them first, obtaining a work sample etc), then we would be more likely to make better hiring decisions, while reducing the risk of legal challenge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With all the social media sites available today, it is still critical to verbally validate a potential employee\u2019s past experience with a previous employer. There\u2019s no denying, however, that a lot can be deduced about someone from a bit of quick searching in the public domain. Facebook, Twitter, and personal blogs can show the entire […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":221,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[73],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n