Damned if you do and damned if you don't. That is the place employers may be speeding toward as they get wildly conflicting demands regarding job applicants' social media postings.
Postings on social sites certainly can and have gotten some employees fired. Presumably, they have persuaded some hirers to pass over job applicants -- sometimes with what seems good reason. For instance, after having his real identity exposed on Gawker, the Reddit troll Michael Brutsch was abruptly fired recently by his Arlington, Texas, employer, a payday loan shop.
Posting on Reddit as "Violentacrez," Brutsch found his, well, metier. Per Gawker's Adrian Chen: "His speciality is distributing images of scantily-clad underage girls, but as Violentacrez he also issued an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore, misogyny, incest, and exotic abominations yet unnamed, all on the sprawling online community Reddit."
In separate but related news, a bill in the New Jersey Legislature would prevent employers from requiring job applicants and employees to turn over social media account names and passwords. That bill had been thought to be on a fast track, putting New Jersey on a growing list of states (including California
and Maryland) with such prohibitions in place.
And then came Cristina's Law, a grassroots effort to require employers to include social media in job applicant background checks. The project stems from an Aug. 31 shooting at a New Jersey supermarket, where an evidently mentally ill employee shot and killed co-workers, including Cristina LoBrutto. The shooter, Terence Tyler, had put up a medley of violent posts on social media, including this tweet from 2009: "smh [shaking my head] is it normal to want to kill ALL of ur coworkers? Maybe but I'm actually in a position where I can, smh."
The petition behind Cristina's Law says: "Had this employer simply performed a background check that included a basic review of its prospective employee's social networking sites, it would have easily learned that this individual made direct threats against those with whom he worked or would work."
The question prompted by all this: What's an employer to do?
In the case of Brutsch's (a.k.a. Violentacrez's) employer, we may well applaud the decision to fire, based on the volume of his negative online revelations. But the New Jersey case is different and more unsettling. Tyler's "smh" tweet dated back to 2009 -- three years before the fatal incident. It was embedded in a series of nearly daily, seemingly normal tweets about football, the gym, and pizza. The shooter's Twitter account went dormant in December 2009. I have seen no mention of more current Twitter postings under a different name or Facebook posts under any name.
Marc Bourne, a vice president at Know It All Intelligence Group, a Bensalem, Pa., background checking firm, told us enactment of Cristina's Law might trigger its own enormous complexities for employers. He said employers can easily run afoul of fair employment practices by unthinkingly noting legally protected information posted by job applicants -- pertaining to everything from religion to a pregnancy. Such information legally cannot enter into hiring decisions; that's why no employer would ever ask the woman with a tummy bulge, "Are you pregnant?" But this is the kind of personal detail found on Facebook and Twitter.
How would an employer ignore data that would incriminate the firm? Bourne suggests hiring third-party background-checking firms like his to do the job -- though some employers may balk at that extra expense.
There are still more problems with the well-intentioned Cristina's Law. Jackie Ford, a Texas lawyer, told me in an email:
Most employers currently are not legally required to do any kind of background check (via social media or otherwise), which makes an internet-specific requirement unusual to say the least. A requirement that employers do an "internet background check" also fails to account for basic aspects of the medium, not the least of which is that much of what is communicated on the internet is false... You have a long list of legal issues facing any employer implementing a background check program.
Bottom line: Employers had better hope the New Jersey law requiring social media background checks goes nowhere. This is a can of worms that simply should not be opened.
Good point, Mary. I'm starting to see a potential Twitter analytics business model. A "background check tool"—send in a Twitter username, an app pulls in tweets for a certain time period, and then does content analysis. I bet that's something HR departments would pay for. A Facebook app would be nice too, but the user would likely have to give permissions, since public FB profiles are less common.
@syedzunair: What I meant was that there may be things on your social media profile which are difficult to verify. For instance, Linked-In allows you endorse people and recommend them. Even if the person might have worked under the claimed capacity, it's difficult to see how true that endorsement and recommendation is. It can easily be something exaggerated.
Yes, you can ask for as many reference letters as you like, but I sometimes wonder what the point is. Do people write bad references? Sometimes, I suppose, but not very often.
It is also possible using the traditional way. People can put up work experience even if they haven't worked actually. Usually what potential employers do at most is to call or drop an email to the focal person you mention in your application. If you are on good personal terms they may actually endorse you without you ever having worked for them.
"What if friends give false endorsements on LinkedIn without having worked with someone applying for a job?"
That's one of the risks of evaluating someone through social media. There might be fake or exaggerated information that's difficult to trace and might mislead the employer.
It would be interesting if someone comes with a do's and dont's checklist that a person can follow to assess if his/her social media profile is appropriate and acceptable. This might also contain tips for making it seem more attractive just like a guide to preparing a better resume. This might be of use to people applying for jobs where they think the employer will evaluate them on their social media profile.
"..it could be easy to lose sight of what's appropriate behavior in the eyes of a recruiter or HR professional."
@Joanne: I think what's appropriate and acceptable differs greatly from the circumstances the person is in. Something that's totally appropriate amongst friends might not be so in a professional gathering. You cannot judge a person from a social media activity without considering the context or the background.
Ariella - that's what is at the center of this. Yes the financial and employment and drug tests are socially acceptable but the social media test? Sure it's in the public domain but still how can this be used against (or even for) you? That's the question that always gets raised.
I agree - pretty good examples of "out there" stuff cited in the post. Are HR or recruiters able to respond directly "About that post regarding the elephants and the circus, could you explain that to me?"
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