Yuk. My younger co worker insists on social media stalking all of our candidates even though I advise her not to

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I stand firm that looking people up is only done so that the looker has dirt on the other person. It's a gross practice to make the lookers feel better about themselves; otherwise, the looker wouldn't feel disappointment when they don't find anything.

I always Google new hires before making the offer. And am always thrilled if I find nothing crazy. Why would I be disappointed? I’m hiring someone who I will interact with a ton.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We routinely Google our candidates. Do I care about their personal lives? Not at all. But I need to know they have the common sense and judgment to control their online presence. For example, we work with government customers; I would be very wary of a candidates with a ton of visible and inflammatory political opinions (regardless what side they are on). Especially since a customer could easily find it and attribute it to my company and our brand.

If the role is public facing and your employee's persona can hurt the business then it's likely going to be a part of hiring process. But for a LOT of jobs it's completely irrelevant what an employee is doing after work, and employers or hiring managers being so invasive should be seen as a flaw in our workplace labor practices.

I am certain that there will be some major law changes going forward and it may become illegal for the employers of non-public facing employees to discriminate. You cannot demand every accountant, IT person, lunch cafeteria worker or a janitor to create online presence and spill out their personal lives for you to browse, and you cannot discriminate against them based on their political or religious beliefs or family status or sexual lives, etc. If we allow this to happen this means that employer OWNS you and you are nothing but a slave because they get to control your ENTIRE LIFE outside of working hours.

The pendulum will swing back and it won't be pretty.

I totally agree with all of this. I’m curious if the laws are different in Europe and other places where privacy laws are more robust. The US lags behind in this area

In Europe, you can’t screen a candidates social media unless it’s directly relevant to the role. Employees are entitled to a private life, including their public posts on social media

Is this true?
One thing I can understand is maybe put some sort of statute of limitations. Like don't write off a 30 year old for what they posted on Twitter as a minor.

But public is public. Even pre social media, if I was a university hiring a professor and they had written a book with racist ideas but left it off their CV, I'd still want to take that into consideration.

[Anonymous]

People shouldn't make public posts about things they don't want the public to know.

[Anonymous]

We don’t have public facing roles and I personally find it invasive and for no good reason. I know it’s public blah blah blah, but I just don’t see that any good comes of it. Our standard background check will bring up anything substantive we need to know. The rest ends up just being idle gossip.

In principle, I don't understand the objection. I wouldn't spend hours on it, but a quick Google search of your candidate's name would be a responsible thing to do before making a job offer. Personally, I would be looking to make sure that the candidate's background aligned with his resume, looking for anything that the candidate had written (many jobs involve having some ability to write, and seeing an article or even a forum post written by the candidate would help to validate or invalidate that ability), and looking for any obvious deal-breakers. Obviously, this gets harder if the candidate has a common name.

I don't really care about hobbies (at least not normal ones...I would be suspicious of someone who seemed to spend a significant amount of time with "fringe" groups (flat Earth society, etc.)) or politics (again, within the range of "normal" political opinions). I do care if the candidate has posted something clearly inappropriate, especially if it has been posted recently. I would ignore/forgive decades-old postings. Another deal-breaker would be a candidate who has a history of filing frivolous lawsuits against previous employers.