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Productivity is an essential part of any business. It helps reduce costs, ensures high-quality work and customer satisfaction, and increases profitability. Many recruiters have begun to utilize social media screening to check candidates’ online profiles before hiring them. However, it is critical that these searches remain compliant and do not reveal protected information such as sex, age, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation.
FCRA Compliance
It’s not just what a candidate posts that can affect their career, but also who they follow and where they spend their time online. For example, a professional social media screening check can look for affiliations with criminal organizations and groups associated with violence or extremism. It can also highlight connections to drugs, fraud, theft, and weapons. Being transparent with candidates about the search scope is essential so they feel safe and targeted. However, if an employer does not comply with FCRA regulations when conducting social media checks, it can open them up to legal risk. Candidates often share protected class information (e.g., family status, religion, sexual orientation, and age) on their social media profiles that cannot be used in a hiring decision. Moreover, some candidates may have multiple accounts under different names in an attempt to protect their privacy.
A compliant third-party company can help mitigate legal risks by filtering out protected class information and ensuring only relevant data is used for hiring decisions. Additionally, a reputable social media screening service has the proper knowledge about social media screening policy. It can identify profiles where a candidate has not been active or has not been linked to them in some way, which can be helpful when assessing applicants for specific roles.
Time
As a business owner, time management is critical. It is essential to save time on tasks that can be completed in another way or by someone else. Inefficiency in this area can be costly, especially for those who are social media and digital marketing focused. Social media marketing requires a unique blend of design, writing, storytelling, and platform-specific knowledge to maximize efficiency. This requires a lot of attention and the ability to prioritize tasks to get the most important work done first. Many businesses need help to keep up with the demands of this fast-paced field, which is why outsourcing can be so beneficial. One of the biggest reasons businesses outsource is to save time on specific processes, such as social media screenings. These types of screenings require a combination of expert technology and an understanding of employment laws to avoid violating privacy laws. A background checking company is an expert in these areas and can perform the screening legally and quickly.
Additionally, many outsourcing partners also offer additional services like content creation services that can help you create and optimize social media copy, content for paid ads, and explainer videos. This can save you time and make managing your social media profiles easier. Having all of your marketing needs handled by the same partner can be incredibly efficient.
Flexibility
When it comes to screening candidates, speed is essential, but so is flexibility. The adage goes, “You can never have too many cooks in the kitchen.” A flexible service provider lets you focus on the critical elements of the background check and outsource the smaller tasks that may be less time-consuming. Outsourcing can also eliminate subjectivity from your team’s screening processes. Instead of making assumptions about a candidate based on what they post online, outsourcing allows you to leave that up to the professionals who specialize in social media screening and can provide unbiased results. Finally, it can help reduce the costs and risks of a bad hire by allowing you to identify red flags through social media before hiring, such as hate speech, sexually explicit content, or violence. Whether you want to ensure that a political staffer doesn’t threaten your brand or weed out a toxic employee, finding these things through the public information on their social media profile can save you time and money. Finding ways to maximize efficiency is critical in a world where people spend up to 31 hours a month in unproductive meetings. While plenty of tools can help you stay on track and be more productive, outsourcing your social media screening to an experienced partner can be one of the best ways to streamline your process and free up time to work smarter.
Legal
With many organizations conducting social media checks as part of their recruitment process, the best practice is to make this a consistent and standardized process for all divisions. This helps to avoid anyone hiring a manager going off and checking a candidate’s social media in a completely ad hoc manner, which could potentially put the company at risk of legal issues. For example, if a candidate’s social media has been compromised, they might have posted some form of illegal activity, which can put the entire company at risk of legal action. Hiring managers can also get caught up in their implicit biases during social media searches, which could lead to a need for more consistency in hiring decisions. This can be difficult to overcome without a standardized and consistent approach across all divisions, where outsourcing your social media background checks comes in handy.
In addition, social media searches conducted by a third-party provider can be much more objective than those conducted by a hiring manager, mitigating the risk of any EEO violations occurring. This is particularly important for organizations implementing Diversity and Inclusion programs, as ad hoc reviews of candidates’ social media can undermine these initiatives. Third-party providers can identify any information on an applicant’s public social media accounts that would disqualify them from employment while screening out any protected class information.
