You have some job openings to fill. You have a stack of applications in front of you. What’s the first thing you do? If you’re like most hiring managers, you’ll go straight to social media. Good idea? Maybe not.
According to a 2018 CareerBuilder survey, some 70 percent of employers check out applicants’ social media profiles as part of their screening process. More than half of those employers have rejected applicants because of what they found.
But that’s a mistake, according to a study led by Iowa University Researcher Chad Van Iddekinge. According to Van Iddekinge, social media sites may not be an effective way to assess candidates, and doing so may also conflict with federal employment law.
In the first of three studies, which were published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, the Iowa researchers found that a significant share of social media profiles contained details that companies may be legally prohibited from considering. These include gender, race, ethnicity (evident in 100% of profiles), disabilities (7%), pregnancy status (3%), sexual orientation (59%), political views (21%), and religious affiliation (41%).
Van Iddekinge commented, “You can see why many recruiters love social media—it allows them to discover all the information they aren’t allowed to ask about during an interview. But that’s a problem, because one of the hallmarks of legal hiring practices is that they focus on behaviors within the work context. There should be a clear distinction between what people do during work and what they do outside of it.”
In the second study, the Iowa researchers found that hiring managers can be influenced by information that they are legally not allowed to consider. For example, they found that recruiters evaluated job applicants who were single less favorably than those who were married or in a relationship, and those who displayed information about their religion on their Facebook pages were rated less favorably than those who did not. And they found that some Facebook pages contained information regarding such negative behaviors as profanity, alcohol use, drug use, or sexual behaviors that was associated with lower recruiter evaluations.
Finally, the Iowa researchers also found that recruiters’ evaluations of applicants’ Facebook pages were not a significant predictor of future job performance. Nor did the information on Facebook appear to improve employers’ ability to make better predictive evaluations.
Van Iddekinge and his group concluded that the widespread use of screening social media profiles during the hiring process may not be useful. And they urged organizations to reconsider the practice of assessing job applicants’ social media pages until evidence of its benefits is found.