How You Should Conduct A Social Media Background Check

The term “background check” for hiring managers often mean verifying the work experience, education and certifications of the people they plan to hire. These days that includes social media background checks as well.

The practice of browsing online profiles of potential candidates has become quite common. Recruiters conduct background checks online to watch out for red flags or to determine if the candidate fits their work culture. However, one has to be cautious when screening their candidates on the internet.

Here are some tips to conduct social media background checks. Use them after finding potential candidates on JobsDB!

Do it towards the end

There’s no need to perform background checks online at the early stages of recruiting. If their resumes don’t catch your eye during screening, there’s no point in searching for their profiles on Facebook.

Wait till you are making final hiring decisions, then perform proper judgments based on their social media.

Have a consistent procedure

When recruiting for a particular position, you either do background checks for all candidates or none at all. You should follow a strict set of rules and guidelines to be fair for all candidates.

The last thing you want to do is decide due to a hiring bias, whether consciously or not.

Only look for outliers

Based on their privacy settings, you could probably get a certain amount of information of candidates. When performing social media checks, look for things that stick out as being very good or very bad.

An example of a weak candidate is probably posting pictures of him or her getting drunk irresponsibly in a party. A good candidate probably posts updates of volunteering work.

It shouldn’t be the final decision

When rejecting a candidate, the reason shouldn’t be because of something you saw on their social media page. Unless it is a major red flag, your decision on rejecting that candidate should be non-discriminatory and legitimate.

Conclusion

It doesn’t matter if you are against browsing candidate’s online profiles or not, conducting a social media background check shouldn’t be your primary source of information. Keep running other types of background checks as they are more reliable than searching a candidate’s social media profile.

If you are looking to hire a candidate, get on https://hk.jobsdb.com/hk/en/home/employerindex now.