Companies have long used criminal background checks, credit reports and even searches on Google and LinkedIn to probe the previous lives of prospective employees. Now, some companies are requiring job candidates to also pass a social media background check.
A year-old start-up, Social Intelligence, scrapes the Internet for everything prospective employees may have said or done online in the past seven years.
Then it assembles a dossier with examples of professional honors and charitable work, along with negative information that meets specific criteria: online evidence of racist remarks; references to drugs; sexually explicit photos, text messages or videos; flagrant displays of weapons or bombs and clearly identifiable violent activity.
Ah yes, those comments on T19 and Stand Firm are going to come back to bite us! 🙂
Let’s see. To get a job these days you need a college degree (best from a prestigious school), great work experience (but not too great because then you might make someone feel threatened or they’ll think the job is just a stepping stone), an excellent credit score, clean criminal background and drug checks, and you can’t have said or posted anything on the Internet that someone somewhere might have found odd or problematic. Hahaha, even a saint wouldn’t qualify!
Seriously, it is highly problematic when companies are spending time and money to arm them with more reasons/excuses NOT to hire people. Perhaps the government should have used the same standards in considering bailout money?
And perhaps we should simply decant and socially/physically condition babies to happily and unquestioningly assume their stations in life, as was predicted a milennium ago by a bloke named Huxley.
Ooops, sorry for missing an L in millenium. I wouldn’t want that to stand in the way of any writing or teaching jobs in the future, lol.
Oh no, I did it again. Millennium. I have to type slower. Or maybe just fix the entire error and type century, perhaps? LOL.
Meh. My wife’s an HR exec, and in her experiance this is done mostly as a quick screen for big no-nos. Essentialy just illegal activity, on the basis that people who tell the world they’re breaking the awa may not have the best judgement. And even then, not for all positions, just high profile and/or spending authority, and it isn’t a make/break issue, but goes into consideration with the rest. This isn’t about not hiring people. It is about making the best choice among a very large pool of applicants. Companies can be picky right now.