Using Social Media To Profile Candidates

// March 19th, 2010 // Employment Branding

I’ve already been involved in some online debates about whether the practice of gathering data from personal social network profiles to research candidates is ethical. And rather than repeat my position, I’ve got some case studies for those who have been commenting, because I think this deserves exploring.

The Swastika Test (a)

You search a candidate’s name – let’s call him Rolf Gerhard. In the image results section, there’s a picture of them holding a swastika armband. It’s on the first page of results, and is linked to a reputable news service, as well as being repeated a few times from other sources. How do you approach this?

The Amazon Test (a)

We saw yesterday software that parses your Amazon.com purchases into your ATS social media profile, as well as other information from various additional social media sites. Your candidate is 38 and male, listed as single, buys a lot of large women’s underwear. Once reviewed Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert online. Bought a book on how to do make up. They’re one of two candidates. The other candidate has no online identity. What’s your conclusion, based on this information?

The Religious Test (a)

You search a candidate’s name and find reviews of Richard Dawkins’ books. The client you’re recruiting for is looking for a senior manager for a not-for-profit that receives church funding. How does this affect your position on the candidate’s culture fit?

Now imagine the following:

The Swastika Test (b)

Information that doesn’t appear in the search format for images includes the caption, which says “Rolf Gerhard displays the swastika he found in his letterbox. Thousands of Jewish families appear to have been targeted.”

The Amazon Test (b)

Your candidate lives with two females, who regularly use his Amazon account to buy goods online and have them delivered. There is no record of this in the transactional data you have in the system.

The Religious Test (b)

Your candidate once reviewed Richard Dawkins online as part of a book club studying a variety of religious texts, and due to SEO on the pages surrounding Dawkins and his recent visits to Australia, pages concerning atheist texts have been pushed up the rankings to appear before the other reviews.

Recruitment agencies and companies will have to define an ethical position on this information and how it applies to their recruitment process. I think due diligence is a great idea when checking candidates. However, there’s a legitimacy of information question involved. If everything (self-published or not) needs to be viewed in context to be understood, will recruiters build the whole picture and maintain objectivity?

Try again….

The Swastika Test (c)

The recruiter is young, new to the industry and to profiling candidates, and comes from a background which was significantly impacted by the Holocaust. Are they affected by seeing a candidate who is coming in for an interview tomorrow with them, holding a swastika?

The Amazon Test (c)

In order to resolve this, in the second interview, the recruiter lets slip that there’s been a social media search and shows the candidate the results. The candidate (who is flustered by having a dossier on them exposed) sees the Amazon results and explains the situation. Does your recruiter see defensive cover-up or explanation?

The Religious Test (c)

In the search results, given the candidate has been painted as an atheism advocate by earlier results, the recruiter finds a reference to the candidate’s name in the summary of a protected position paper on late-term abortions, which can’t be read fully. Your recruiter can’t access the facts, but presents the reference as being an ‘unresolved’ question about the candidate to the client’s hiring manager.

So what do we need to consider?

Ethical questions about whether the existence of this information means you should use it aside, it’s obvious that without all the facts, this data is online hearsay. It’s inconsistent, and distracts from your purpose – can this candidate do the job? Does this social media dossier distract recruiters from their traditional observations of character in person and in communication? If I were new to social media (and there are still millions of people who are) being told “If you didn’t want us to find this you should have protected yourself better” is a cop-out of the highest order. If you haven’t told the candidate this is happening, it’s snooping. It isn’t reference checking – references are supplied. It isn’t ‘doing a background check’ because you aren’t checking facts. You’re building a picture from individual behaviours, served without context. Without an objective standard (like LinkedIn) how does this data serve as a quantifiable resource for evaluating fit for role/culture?

And finally

Yesterday we had a TinyChat discussion about this. About six of us were talking, when I flagged the Swastika question above. The exchange went like this:

Me: What would you think if you googled me and found a pic of me holding a swastika armband?

NotMe: I’d like it if I were recruiting for the Nazi Party

NotMe: (continues on thread here)

Out of context, can I then publish that NotMe said in an online discussion “I’d like it if I were recruiting for the Nazi party ”? The quote is accurate. And I’m not required to explain the context on my blog. If that little gem turned up when researching a candidate, how would you respond?