Background screening spreads to social networking

pre-employment background screening to the next level. It is essentially taking the traditional background checks that are commonly used by corporate human resource departments to look for things like criminal records and moving them online to track social media networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, LinkedIn, and individual blogs. “You cannot believe the things that we see. The amount of references to drugs and alcohol and the amount of provocative photos and the things that people say is jaw dropping,” says Max Drucker, chief executive of Social Intelligence Corp. “People that we see that are applying for jobs that have this kind of really incriminating information out there.” Social Intelligence Corp. uses information about an individual, provided to them by an organization, to find their online activity on social networks – photos posted on facebook, blog entries and even the comments they post in online communities. Is this a step too far, or a natural progression as our online personas become an important part of our offline selves? No one can doubt that any form of background checks are necessary to protect a company or a business, and seeing photos of an individual taking drugs online is without question a valid reason for not employing them. But gaining an understanding of an individual via their online personality could create a bias and an opinion which simply isn’t representative of what this person is like offline – as a real person. It will be interesting to see how Social Intelligence Corp. is received by both businesses and job-seekers, and whether other start-ups begin to follow suit.]]>