Recent trends in employment background screening

Did you know that Sterling Talent Solutions is one of our partners? Sterling offers a whole suite of employment background screening products, including everything from criminal checks, to credit reports, in addition to our social media hiring reports. They recently published a report on 2017 Background Screening Trends containing insightful industry information. Here's a recap of the relevant trends that apply in the realm of social media reports.

Sterling's key findings

According to a survey conducted by Sterling, 45% of employers said that their top priority was reducing time-to-hire. Furthermore, 38% of employers indicated that their biggest challenge was making sure that they had all of the information to make an informed hiring decision.

Only 34% of the employers surveyed responded saying that they perform social media background checks on their potential employees. The companies who are conducting social media checks revealed that 95% of them are being done internally, with just 5% being outsourced to a third-party screener.

How can Social Intelligence help your company?

We can reduce your time-to-hire AND provide you with all the information you need to make an informed hiring decision

Our social media hiring reports are completed quickly and thoroughly. After we verify that we have located your candidate's online presence, our expert analysts take over. They look for four types of red flag behavior: anything sexually explicit, racist or intolerant, illegal, or violent. If this type of behavior is discovered, the analysts take a screenshot and compile that information into a report.

Conducting social media checks in-house can be problematic for a number of reasons. It can be a waste of an HR department's time and energy to poke around trying to find a candidate's online footprint. Without training, they may identify the incorrect person, and are unlikely to know what to look for.

Most importantly, it can be an invasion of the applicant's privacy. The majority of people have protected class information visible on their accounts. HR Manager Suzie does not (and should not) need to know that Jane Doe attends a Morman church and was recently married. This type of information cannot be used to make a hiring decision, and it can set up a company for a discrimination lawsuit (E.g. "You didn't hire me because ____."). We redact all protected class information found so that your HR team is unable to see it.

Interested in learning more about our product? Fill out our contact us form.

Contributing author: Caitlin Rogers