As an employer, it’s important to balance your need to gather information about an applicant with their need for privacy. They might provide more information about a candidate’s honesty on their resume. Expect reporting abilities, audit trails, and the kind of support that answers when you need it. Whether you’re managing a data request or have a question about navigating adverse action, your vendor should have your back.
For Brands & Influencer Partnerships
This checklist gives you exactly that sector-specific guidance, automation tips, and practical steps to help you move at speed without slipping on compliance. A helpful guide to evolving your onboarding process and delivering a reliable compliance strategy through automation.
Help Employers Understand Cultural Fit
In 2025, we rely on it for news, communication, and entertainment—but with increased usage comes increased risk. From misinformation to cyberbullying, social media can be misused in ways that impact both individuals and organisations. Disadvantages include delayed results from common names, aliases and customer reviews indicating inaccurate work. Small business packages are $29 per candidate, but larger businesses must contact First Advantage for further pricing. A potential downside is there’s no mobile version of Peopletrail, restricting users to accessing and requesting information from their main computer. Cisive tailors pricing packages so you don’t overpay for unused features, allowing you to fully align your services with your organization’s goals.
Learn more about social media background checks
Our searches will highlight the behavioural risks identified within social media profiles. This is now an essential part of the background screening process, particularly when hiring. Even leaving aside the EEOC’s issues with social media background checks, there just isn’t much there in terms of accuracy and relevance. Sure, every once in a while, you will find an applicant who defames former employees on Facebook, or who uses Twitter to spew sexist vitriol. Usually, though, social media accounts are a bedrock of information that bears no relevance on whether or not a person is hirable.
Consumer Brands & Influencers
Your social media presence can be just as important as your résumé when applying for a job. Employers often look at public profiles to get a fuller picture of who you are beyond your application. What you share, intentionally or not, can influence hiring decisions in both positive and negative ways.
What Are Some Social Media Guidelines To Follow When Applying For Jobs?
Try Phyllo today and simplify social media checks with the compliance-first approach your hiring team needs. As people share more of themselves online, what used to be private is now public record. All you need to request a social media check is a person’s name and email address. Candidates will provide details of active profiles during the background check.
Phase 1: Audit Your Current Presence (The Foundation)
For recruiters, this digital shift means more candidate insights are available online. A Web and Social Media Check evaluates an individual’s broader online presence, including social media profiles and other publicly available web content. These checks provide recruitment professionals with a deeper understanding of a candidate beyond their CV and interviews, ensuring they align with company culture and values. The legality of social media background checks on potential hires by recruiters and interviewers in the UK is also a complex issue. The UK has strict data protection laws that apply to the collection and use of personal data, including data collected from social media. It involves checking the information on a candidate’s social media profiles.
Social media check – get the scoop on your next hire
One of the most common concerns employers raise is, “Are social media checks even legal? ” Currently, there is no specific law prohibiting social media and adverse media background checks in the hiring process. If an account is public, it serves as a candidate’s digital footprint and can be considered as part of their evaluation. However, transparency is key—it’s best practice to inform candidates that their public social media activity will be reviewed as part of the recruitment process. Social media background checks involve reviewing a candidate’s publicly available online presence across social media platforms.
Best Practices for Summer Internship Recruitment
A movie quote or reposted news article isn’t the same as a genuine risk—and good solutions know the difference. One problematic post can lead to legal headaches, internal fallout, or even a brand crisis. Social media screening helps companies get ahead of issues that might otherwise catch them off guard.
Our Pre-Employment Screening Services
It’s important to consider the context of the information you obtain from it and avoid making hasty judgments. By using social media checks to supplement traditional screening methods, you can improve the hiring process and ensure the best fit for both the candidate and the company. With over 140 background checks, including DS/DBS, IDVT, and reference checks, you can spot red flags early, reduce hiring risks, and ensure every candidate aligns with your company values.
Lack of Transparency, Legality and Scope
- We discussed the risks of extremism on social media above, but this rarely happens independently.
- Even old posts that no longer reflect your views or values might hurt your chances if they’re visible publicly.
- The social media laws in the UK have been clarified in recent years, to ensure clear parameters are set regarding the types of social media behaviour which will be deemed unlawful.
- In fact, a 2023 survey found that a large majority of Canadian companies (86%) say they would fire an employee over inappropriate social media posts.
- Want to see how Phyllo can enable background checks for your next influencer partnership or hiring?
- Most individuals have multiple social media accounts, even on the same platform.
- Social media background checks are an increasingly common part of hiring in 2025.
Social media is the perfect tool to find the right candidates for your company. It is a way to find out whether or not they would be a good fit for your company culture. A study conducted by the Boston Consulting Group found that companies who use social media in hiring have an average cost per hire of $5,000 less than those who don’t. Social media can also help you make sure that you’re hiring the right people.
An employer should complete several vital steps to ensure that they get the most out of their screening process. As a former recruiter turned content writer, Ann specializes in creating engaging content. With a passion for the recruitment industry, she helps businesses streamline hiring and attract top talent using innovative solutions. Record only observations relevant to the job, avoiding assumptions based on personal lifestyle choices that aren’t job-related.
- Uncover data-driven, actionable insights with automated reference, pulse and exit surveys.
- Two-thirds (65%) say they use social media to screen applicants, and 64% consider it an effective screening method.
- Social media background checks can help you gain insights into a candidate’s character, work ethic, and cultural fit.
- Candidates will provide details of active profiles during the background check.
- We’re the only team of UK-based professionals that deliver pre-employment screening services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
It is a pleasure working with CV insight and would recommend their services. For over ten years, Clarion Housing has partnered with CV Insight as our trusted employment screening provider for both new and existing employees. Their seamless integration into our processes, along with their unwavering commitment to prompt turnaround times and attention to detail, have proven to be invaluable assets. We would recommend CV Insight to any organisation in search of a reliable and https://flocksocial.com/blog/social-media-background professional partner for their employment screening needs.
Why choose M19 for your social media background checks
- Services include criminal record searches for citizens and non-citizens, employment and education verifications, professional license checks, civil litigation and financial irregularity reviews, and identity validation.
- These laws generally do not ban employers from searching publicly available social media information, however.
- Cisive offers comprehensive background checks in China in accordance with the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), Cybersecurity Law, and Data Security Law.
- When conducting social media background checks in-house, you expose yourself to claims of bias because you cannot “unsee” any protected characteristic information.
- DISA offers social media background check services that help employers identify potential risks by analyzing candidates’ online activities.
- It consists of verification of any evidence that the person has had inappropriate conversations or interactions on various social media platforms.
Care Check processes more than 130,000 DBS checks annually across a wide variety of sectors. For further guidance regarding DBS checks and how to arrange them for your prospective employees, please contact us today. LinkedIn is the social platform you use to highlight your professional skills, experience and success stories; there’s a reason recruiters utilise LinkedIn as a way to connect with individuals who may be interested in a vacancy. Therefore, the things you post on this specific platform are most likely very different from interacting with other social media websites like Twitter and Facebook. Depending on the vendor, Social Media Background Checks may be performed by a human team or automated with a human overseeing the process.
Built-In Compliance
Our offerings include nationwide criminal background checks, employment and education verifications, professional license validation, credit and civil litigation history, and right-to-work confirmation. We also provide identity authentication, driver’s license and record validation, professional references, adverse media and social media screening, as well as global sanctions and directorship checks. These services are tailored to meet local compliance requirements and help global employers hire with confidence in the Philippines. Cisive provides comprehensive background screening services in Canada, tailored to comply with the country’s complex and multi-jurisdictional privacy laws, including PIPEDA and provincial equivalents. We also offer social and adverse media searches, global sanctions screening, directorship reviews, and financial regulatory checks.
So, whether they will reveal information concerning offensive social media messages depends upon the nature of the content shared over the platform and its potential relevance to the job the applicant wishes to be considered for. If information is shared with your prospective employer and they are not familiar with social media conduct, it may also require an explanation. However, there’s always the potential for online conversations to lead to Twitter wars or escalate to other forms of social media conflicts. Whilst social media disagreements happen every day, in rare cases, they can lead to the police becoming involved and there have even been cases of people obtaining a criminal record as a result of their social media conduct. LinkedIn is only the second most popular social media platform used by hiring managers as part of a recruitment drive. Our recent survey revealed that Facebook is the most popular choice, with 79% of those surveyed using it as part of the hiring process.
With structured queries, we will highlight at least 5 issues (if applicable). On the positive side, a clean, professional online presence can strengthen your candidacy. Employers may be impressed by thoughtful posts, community involvement, or industry-related content that shows you’re passionate about your work. Engaging with others respectfully or showcasing leadership in online communities can also leave a strong impression.
How technology based social media checks work
In most cases, employers who look at social media profiles are searching for character issues that don’t show up on background checks and that applicants successfully hide in interviews. An applicant might be perfectly polite in the interview, but make sexist or racist jokes on Twitter, for instance. Perhaps the applicant repeatedly badmouths former employees and co-workers on social media. Or maybe that person’s photo albums are full of pictures that depict him or her binge drinking or partaking in drugs. That’s why running social media background checks on yourself before applying to jobs is a smart move.
Understanding privacy laws, compliance regulations, risks, and rights can help ensure a fair and transparent process. Employers should also ensure that their social screening practices are in line with FCRA guidelines to lawfully and legally use social media background checks. Because finding the right person on Facebook can be like searching for a needle in a haystack, some employers have demanded that their applicants provide a URL link to their Facebook profiles as part of the application process. This request simplifies the act of finding the right people on social media, but only slightly.
