Social networking websites have provided an enormous opportunity for people to meet each other, stay in touch and share the personal details of their lives. Recruiters and employers are making use of websites like Facebook and MySpace to seek additional information about job applicants.
According to a 2007 survey, 44% of employers used social networking websites such as Facebook to screen job applicants(1). And, a 2009 survey(2) conducted by CareerBuilder.com found that more than half of those managers chose not to hire an applicant after viewing their online profile. It’s clear that Human Resource policies have not kept pace with the rapid use of social networking websites for background checks and that the challenges faced by HR personnel are ahead of the legal developments in this area.
What are the Risks?
EEO law severely limits the type of information an employer can ascertain and use during a selection process. It’s not illegal to know a candidate’s martial status, religion or political leanings, so long as an employer can show that the information was not used to discriminate. Companies don’t typically ask for this type of information on application forms, preferring to swear off all knowledge of these characteristics. However, the information is easily found on Facebook and other social networking websites. If employers don’t have clear anti-discrimination policies in place they’re vulnerable to charges that they used the information found on social networking websites to screen out protected groups.
Principles of unfair inference prohibit information from being considered factual unless it can be shown to be relevant and accurate. Many job applicants post information about their out-of-work activities that could be considered less than desirable by an employer. But it would be unfair for an employer to assume that a few ‘interesting’ photos from a weekend party have anything to do with how an applicant might behave at work – context matters! Limited content requirements and the ability to make up a profile for other people on most social networking websites puts into question any assumptions of accuracy.
What Could Social Networking Websites Offer Employers?
With unemployment rates in the U.S. at an all time high, employers face an increased number of qualified applicants for the positions they advertise. While they might enjoy having access to large high-quality pools of talent, stakeholder obligations and an increasingly competitive business environment mean that getting the right person into the job is critical. And therein lies the question. Can social networking websites help companies get the right person into the job? That is, do social networking websites provide job relevant and organizationally relevant information about candidates?
There is an enormous amount of positive evidence linking personality and intelligence to successful job performance. In an employment selection context they’re normally assessed through self-report style questionnaires and tests; although it’s well documented that people can assess the personality and intelligence of others quite accurately even after a short exposure. Other-ratings of personality could be quite useful in an employment selection context where candidates may give socially desirable responses to self-report personality questionnaires. Social networking websites might provide a means to assess personality. For example, extroversion could be related to number of friends, tagged photos or the amount of wall posts a person makes.
Likewise, other-ratings of intelligence and biographical data have been shown to predict intelligence test scores. This provides some evidence that the assessment of intelligence could be viable within the context of social networking websites if the ratings were linked to the types of interest groups one joins, the books one reads, intellectual pursuits and biographical information.
While there is almost no empirical research that investigates the use of social networking websites in employment selection, Kluemper and Rosen(3) published the first study that looked at the feasibility of using personal information available on social networking websites to improve employment selection decisions.
They looked at rater consensus and rater accuracy when assessing an individual’s personality, intelligence and performance from the information available on social networking websites. That is, did the raters agree with each other on their ratings and were they able to distinguish those individuals that are high on a characteristic from those who are low.
Despite a very limited sample, results showed that ratings of personality, intelligence and a construct they called global performance were consistent across the trained raters in the study and that the raters were able to accurately distinguish between individuals that scored high and those that scored low on four out of five personality traits, intelligence and global performance. The study provides some initial evidence that trained raters can determine organizationally relevant traits from social networking website information – although clearly a lot more research needs to be done and this study should not be used by organizations to support their decision to use social networking website information in an employment selection context.
What Does this Mean for Employers?
When deciding whether to use social networking website information in an employment selection context, employers must ask themselves the fundamental question – is the information I’m looking at job relevant?
If it’s determined that the answer to that question is yes, then weighing up the risk and deciding how to reduce it are the next steps. Three basic questions come to mind. First, am I assessing, or could I be perceived to be assessing information that could adversely impact a protected group? Second, am I making, or could I be perceived to be making unfair inferences based on the information I view online? And third, how can I reduce my vulnerability to those claims?
Consider these points…
• Ensure you have clear anti-discrimination policies in place.
• Document clearly the type of information that you will collect from social networking websites and be ready to demonstrate that it is fair and job relevant.
• Train HR personnel in how to collect job relevant and organizationally relevant information from social networking websites to ensure they are not making unfair inferences about candidates based on what they see online.
• Communicate to job applicants that background checks will involve a search of the Internet.
• Be aware that there is no verification process on social networking websites and weight any information collected accordingly.
Photo: From Flickr under Creative Commons License
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References
(1) Recruiting inside, 2009.
(2) CareerBuilder.com,2010.
(3) Kluemper & Rosen, 2009
