It’s no surprise that hiring managers are turning to social media when making hiring decisions; in fact, research indicates that at least half of hiring managers will use social media research. Job candidates are encouraged to clean up their public facing social media content when job seeking, and with good reason.

However, before your firm takes to social media research to further vet potential candidates, it’s important to have the right safeguards in place to be sure that your methods are not controversial or lead to problems later on.

I recently came across a study that looked at discrimination in hiring practices, specifically related to social media research. Carnegie Mellon conducted a study to look at such discrimination. The article explains the study as follows:

“Alessandro Acquisti and Christina M. Fong of Carnegie Mellon University recently conducted a large-scale field experiment about social media use in hiring. First they created Facebook profiles for fictional job candidates, striving to make them identical, except for indications of religious affiliation (listed as Christian or Muslim) or sexuality (gay versus straight). Next they submitted applications for these fictional job candidates to more than 4,000 employers. These did not indicate religious affiliation or sexuality. The only way to determine the candidates’ religious preference or sexual orientation was to search for and examine their Facebook profiles.

About 33% of the companies in the sample seem to have examined the candidates’ social media profiles. The researchers found no statistically significant discrimination against gay candidates. They did, however, find that employers in Republican areas of the United States (based on election results) exhibited significant bias when extending interview invitations — against Muslim applicants, and in favor of Christian applicants. In the 10 states with the highest percentage of votes for the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, only about 2% of the Muslim applicants were invited for interviews, compared with about 17% of the Christian applicants.”

While this is one study, the article states that these statistics fall in line with other similar studies.

It’s a well known fact that factors such as race, religion, and marital status cannot be used in consideration of a potential employee; I don’t think that hiring managers seek out this information, but do come across it when conducting basic social media research, which typically includes a Google search or even searching for a candidate on Facebook. However, when doing so, one cannot “unsee” this type of information, and it is very difficult to prove that the specific information that cannot be used for consideration wasn’t.

So, what’s a hiring manager to do?

Simply put, hiring managers need to turn to third party services for such social media research, or social media background checks as they’re often referred to. The background checks conducted by third party vendors have built in benefits that many do not even consider when using social media to research candidates, such as:

• The searches are more comprehensive than a typical Google search: it takes a lot of time to manually research a person using Google, and even longer to cross reference potential content that may be tied to a candidate, or tied to someone with a similar name. The programs used for third party services is intuitive, deep, and efficient in determining identity.
• You don’t see what you’re not supposed to: formal social media background checks are compliant with the FCRA, and will not provide content that falls within protected data. There is no opportunity to “see” something that shouldn’t been seen. The good news is that, should hiring practices be questioned, it will be much easier to prove that the data used in the decision making process was compliant.
• A third party source creates a layer of protection: using a third party vendor for social media background checks can give weight to the social content collected and used as part of the hiring process. By showing that it is an independent source, it can be helpful in protecting the company with regard to its hiring practices.

Social media content is a valuable tool in ensuring you hire the right people; the right hiring decisions lead to the strongest team. It’s wise to be as cautious as possible to avoid any potential issues, and using a third party source might be the best bet for your hiring managers to take advantage of.