I am wary of recruiters and HR professionals who use social media tools to conduct informal assessments of candidates. I know you know this, but…
- Not everything on the internet is true.
- Just because you see something on the internet and think it is true doesn’t mean it is true.
- Even if it is true, the internet has demonstrated that truth cannot exist without context. Sometimes the truth is subjective.
During a traditional hiring process, companies will interview candidates and make hiring decisions based on a job description with established criteria. There may be a specific set of questions. Once a hiring decision is made, most companies then ask a candidate to consent to a background check and drug tests as part of an offer process.
When you throw in random Google and Facebook searches into the process — and you forget to search candidates equally and with the same criteria because you are just messing around on the internet and stumble upon a juicy picture or a weird comment on a website — you introduce an unreliable and invalid set of measurements into the mix.
Furthermore, what happens when you do find a risque picture of a candidate on the internet?
- It might not be your candidate.
- It might be photoshopped.
- It may have been taken without your candidate’s knowledge.
- It may have been taken with your candidate’s knowledge but the image may have been stolen and misused.
- Maybe the image was originally put on the internet, then removed — but Google keeps everything forever and now you are seeing the picture on Google Cache.
When you are hiring a new employee, you want someone who is results-oriented, competent, and decent. You would prefer to hire someone who doesn’t belong to Al Qaeda. Go ahead and use your social media tools as part of the recruiting process; however, invoke common sense and critical thinking as part of your recruiting process, too.
{ 3 trackbacks }
{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
@ Laurie,
Some interesting thoughts on the subject. Two points I would like to make on this subject:
Many people simply forget that what gets on the internet, becomes public image of you, therefore you have to monitor and protect yourself. So we can say that, if candidate is not protecting his image, what will make him contribute to protecting and furthering good image of his company. No matter the size of the company, it takes “a village” to promote and protect the image of the organization.
As far as hiring goes, those searches provide me with sources for questions. Some candidates get intimidated by someone of authority, so having some good questions to break that ice, warm them up so they show their true colors is something I like to do. When fit is very important to your team, getting beyond skills and into personality is just hard to avoid. Those profiling tests and other overpriced junk in the market just won’t do good when it comes to figuring out how the chemistry might work.
In defense of those with “questionable” internet presence, I’d like to say that i do not LIVE my work. While I love my field, at 5pm I become my own person. My opinions have always been strictly my own and I would hope that no one would think for a moment that my views were in any way reflective on or representative of my employers.
WRT protecting the image of the company…It’s sort of analogous to personal laptops vs work laptops. I treat my work laptop like gold; it does not belong to me. It gets handled with the utmost care. My personal laptop…has stickers all over it.
@A_S So all good points, right, except I worry about the unfair application of a screening process that a) doesn’t screen all candidates consistently and fairly and b) doesn’t take into account that it’s incredibly burdensome to ask everyone to protect their images on the internet.
True story: I fired a man in 1998 for taking a picture of his boss (a woman) and cutting and cropping her face onto the head of a woman giving a hand job to a horse. He used MS Paint, I believe. This was well before the days of awesome photoshop applications, internet sites, social media tools.
Someone could do the same with your picture, Apolinaras. We could take your image from this blog — your little avatar — and put it on a bevy of sites without your knowledge and it wouldn’t say a darn thing about you or your character. It says more about the state of the internet and humanity.
I feel that recruiters, HR pros, and hiring managers need to think hard about how they use the internet to discern the character & morals of a candidate.
@Sherry I think the real debate is how private/public personae will merge into one. Since when is a criminal background check and a drug test not enough? Are you allowed to have a private life in America, or are you judged by the random review of your personalities and images on the interet?
Wait a minute, hold the pressess – everything on the internet is not true? Does this mean that the deposed king I’m helping through some financial troubles may not be legit?
In all honesty, it’s wrong to form opinions of people based on innuendo, and that is what the internet truly provides, the largest, fastest gossip grape vine in the world. So I find it best to ignore it in regards to any candidates. If I could interview and assess candidates abilities to contribute to my organization (and in turn my organization to be mutually beneficial to them) prior to the intergoogles, and can still do now.
But please Laurie tell me the following internet things are real, since a lot of my personal belief system is founded on them:
1. Drunk Hasselhoff eating a hamburger off the floor in the presence of his children
2. The diet coke mentos thing
However, I do hope and pray that all pictures of Donatella Versace on TMZ have been photoshopped, because that can’t be real.
@Jimmy I liked Hasselholf more once I saw him on the floor & eating a burger. I thought, “Yeah, there’s a celebrity who could really fit in with my family.”
I had a fairly “deep” internet search run on me as part of a background check with an employer; full blown probe run by state police and FBI that went well beyond the basic crim check and credit checks (hello – can you say “talk to your neighbors?”). They (police) delved into the internet-world and found places where my maiden/married name popped up and at the conclusion, they handed over the file to me which is how I saw it all. Weird and random stuff I had done YEARS ago which is now being stored in cyberspace.
Now this was a few years ago before some online additions to my repetoire – and I by NO means have a major internet presence. If they ran the search today, they would perhaps see a bit more of my personality I guess, but I still am conscious of what I myself post.
I say that if employers feel compelled to do any of these type searches as part of their selection process please do the following: (1) use a brain when evaluating results and (2) run the ‘checks’ consistently.
I am sure quite a few ERs tend to want to google/facebook search EEs of a certain age only… (I know I have had mgrs want to do just that) and don’t even consider googling Sally-sixty-year-old.
Attention recruiters:
I have a fairly unique name. However I am not the only me. If you do a google search for “Lexy Lastname” with my city you do not find me until page 4. Besides complete irrelevant stuff that is the result of my last name being an english adjective, there is also another woman in this town with my name.
If you aren’t careful, and you think she is me (it should be obvious that she is not if you have met me, but if you ahve my resume it would be harder to tell) you might think I wouldn’t be a great candidate.
The result that does show up for me is a paper I wrote in 1999 for my senior english class that is now part of online curriculum for high school teachers. It’s a bit embarassing but it is a good paper.
I think we should never forget about the people and getting to know the candidates over the phone or Face2Face, that means going beyond the paper and knowing the person. If you are a recruiter, a pro recruiter you will get the idea of the candidate personality in a short time.
If you are going to be searching over the candidate’s name in internet you can find false or True info. it is correct? it is legal? anyone can take a name a do stuff on internet… that’s mean you have a bad candidate?
Just two days ago I got messages from Twitter not so pleasant from one user that I follow, her little brother was playing with it and he sent out those messages.
maybe that
@roolvoel I think you’re right about the indiscriminate way google searches are done… and I wonder if google searches are done on as many 60 yr old candidates as are done on 26 yr old candidates?
@Lexy Good point. Lots of assumptions fly on the internet. Unfortunately, I’m the only Laurie Ruettimann.
@SilentLeo That’s a good point about internet impostors. I created my husband’s LinkedIn account. I could have written anything.
Dear Employer:
My life is not your business and your business is not my life. If you’re Googling me, you have too much time on your hands. I suggest you lay yourself off.
Best regards,
Your Employee
It’s really sad how many really strong candidates are bypassed during the HR process of poking, prodding, drug-testing, et al.
Three years ago, I was the final candidate interviewed for my position. I was the one that stuck out, with a myriad of odd jobs, work experiences, and diverse skill set. The group could have said, “gee, he’s changed jobs quite often, or, “he seems to have a bit of a renegade spirit,” or weeded me out because I was probably the only one without an advanced degree.
Instead, they recognized that compared to the other 20 candidates for my position, I had some intangible qualities, one of which was passion and a grassroots organizing background that made me good at troubleshooting and follow-through
This interview team of five recognized that their newly-created position needed an “out of the box” person to utilize this role to jumpstart our non-profit, and take things to a whole new level.
Please don’t misconstrue my point–it’s not about my success so much (although a review of my work would surely indicate that, but that I would never have gotten in the door to take a fledgling program from a localized pilot to the statewide level, if the traditional methods of screening were adhered to.
Am I the exception to the rule on these things? I don’t think so. One of the reasons that many organizations continue to flounder, and fail in reinventing themselves, is that they keep making the same hiring mistakes, yet expect a different result. Find a new way to do things–you might be pleasantly surprised!
Every tool has it uses and it’s limitations. Google et al. are powerful fast tools and a useful addition to traditional methods. So like any tool used badly they will produce bad results. I would say the advice to “invoke common sense and critical thinking as part of your recruiting process” applies equally to all HR tools.
One point not raised is that the good candidates will have done the same searches on you and your on organization, what will they find?
@Jenn This is why I hate corporate america. They take a good tool and misuse it. Dorks.
@bizdirector Love the point about making the same old mistakes about hiring. It’s totally right. We need you as our VP of HR.
@Yant Excellent. If you’re not googling your potential employer, you’re a sucker.
Can’t the Internet be used to frame somebody?
@James Did you see that in a movie?
Nice look at the dark side of the social media’s role in the selection process Laurie!. I’ve shared your post with my readers in my weekly Rainmaker ‘Fab Five’ blog picks of the week (found here:http://www.maximizepossibility.com/employee_retention/2009/03/the-rainmaker-fab-five-blog-picks-of-the-week-2.html) to share your insight with my readers.
Be well Laurie!
Thanks, Chris!
I find that the recruiting process is positively impacted by Social Media if it is used to identify, explore and communicate with potential candidates. Use of the Internet and Social Media to interrogate, exclude or attempt to perform an “FBI-esque” background check on the cheap is a waste of time.
With tools like Photoshop you never know if a photo online is real, and text inputted online has absolutely no validation criteria.
My recommendation is for recruitment personnel to use Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn for only the purposes from which a direct and accountable reference can be derived. I blogged about this the other day.. http://bashfoo.org/recruiting-talent-through-twitter/
Thanks,
Mike McDermott
Social networking and search engine queries may now be the shortcut for recruiters. While it may be tempting to judge them as “truths” regarding the candidates, you still can’t be too sure whether they are 100% verifiable.
I think old school personal interviews and background checks will still be a reliable measurement for a candidate’s qualification.