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The Pitfalls Of Using Social Networking To Screen Potential Employees

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Here’s an excellent article on using social networks for employee screening.

Source: IT Business Edge

Lora Bentley spoke with Jacqueline Klosek, senior counsel and privacy law practitioner at Goodwin Procter, about the pitfalls employers want to avoid when using social networking and other Web sites to screen potential employees.

Bentley: I’ve read about the public outcry that resulted from the City of Bozeman, Montana’s decision to ask job applicants for their social networking site user names and passwords. Obviously, there are enough problems associated with that practice that the city discontinued it. Can you explain?

Klosek: It’s just, in my mind, fraught with legal dangers. For example, what you post on your own Web site, the writings and photos and such, you’re really using someone else’s service. And for the most part, if you provide your password to the sites in which you participate, you could be violating their terms of use, which could leave you as the user subject to potential claims, including termination of your account or worse.

Then, as an employer, say you ask someone for their user name and password and then give it to another employee to do the screening, you don’t know exactly what they’re going to do with that information. With the user name and password, they’re basically impersonating the person whose account it is. They can send e-mails that purport to be on that person’s behalf, they can review e-mails that were sent from other people… It could be mundane personal communications, but there could also be trade secrets being exchanged, or a host of other things behind these protected e-mails. It’s just a minefield of dangers, in my view.

Bentley: What if you are using the Internet to screen prospective employees without their user names and passwords? Aren’t there still risks in doing that?

Read the rest of the article here.

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Photo Credit: AdamSelwood

Hiring Managers Are Checking You Out

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According to a Jump Start Social Media survey that polled 100 hiring managers at small, mid-sized and large companies:

Three-quarters of hiring managers check LinkedIn to research the credentials of job candidates.  Of the hiring managers surveyed, 75% use LinkedIn, 48% use Facebook, and 26% use Twitter to research candidates before making a job offer.

“Social media is not only a great networking tool, it’s also a way for employers to perform reference checks on job candidates,” said Veronica Fielding, president of Digital Brand Expressions and its social media service for consumers, Jump Start Social Media. “Because LinkedIn is the most professionally oriented of the three, it tends to attract hiring managers who are doing due diligence.”

Read the rest of the article here.

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Are Colleges Spying On High School Students?

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From The (Toledo) Blade

There has been a growing trend in recent years for employers to check out MySpace, Facebook, and, more recently, Twitter pages on the Internet to learn more about people applying for jobs. There even have been cases in which college students were denied degrees or certifications because of objectionable things posted on their social networking sites.

Now, high school students have cause to beware as well because a significant number of colleges are using these sites, as well as search engines, to research and evaluate applicants, even denying admissions or scholarships based on what they find.

According to the National Association for College Admission Counseling, 26 percent of college admission officers surveyed said they used Internet search engines and 21 percent said they used social networking sites to research prospective students. The survey of hundreds of colleges was conducted by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth.

In other words, it’s not just predators who might be monitoring the tweets and posts of teenagers. It also could be the people who decide where those teens go to college, which ought to make young people pause before they hit the send button to share with friends their latest exploits.

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Photo Credit: lancefisher

5 Legal Reasons Why Your Company Should Have a Social Networking Policy

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Frederic Abramson over at the New York Business Law Blog gives you 5 Legal Reasons Why Your Company Should Have a Social Networking Policy.

Read them here.

I also recommend that you follow Frederic Abramson on Twitter here.  He is a New York Business Law Attorney that offers lots of great advice.