Integrating social media checks into your recruitment practices

Published February 2024

Written by Phil Blasdale

Phil Blasdale leads the Product team for Experian’s Background checking business. Phil believes recruitment is at paradigm of change with traditional barriers to change being eroded. His focus and drive is to evolve the journey for candidates and employers into a simple, digital, automated journey using the power of data and technology.

How to do social media check correctly

Just over 2 years ago, I asked some of our customers , “Would you conduct a social media check on your prospective candidate”, and I got a range of answers. I asked them again recently and the overwhelming answer was yes!!!. However, there was still a “BUT”, and this time around, it was more about the “HOW?” and not the “Why!“

Social media is becoming an integral part of our lives, shaping how we consume information and most importantly about how we engage and communicate. It is evident that social media contains a lot of information about many people, their likes, dislikes, influences and behaviour and are often prevalent across many sites. This offers a greater understanding of your candidates, the risk associated with hiring and the overall fit with your business. So much so, that education and health sectors have made big steps to introduce the right level of social media screening to their recruitment processes, but that has left another problem to be solved.

With so much information out there, the question is now “How do I do a social media check correctly?”

Whilst there are some common themes, the approach varies across each job role, and each sector of employment. HR teams are not trained to trawl through the internet and extract information about a prospective employee. What one person might find offensive, another colleague might not, so how do you ensure that there is consistency and no unconscious bias? How do you make the check cost effective, fair and accurate? It’s hard and the biggest piece of feedback I get.

Online behaviour is important, now more so than ever, particularly in sensitive safeguarding roles – it’s always been a grey area for employers, but what are you doing to ensure you are fully informed when making your recruitment decision?

How can we help?

At Experian we offer a solution for employers to eliminate risk and conduct fully GDPR compliant social media checks. Utilising AI technology, powerful screening and online behaviour evaluation tools designed to objectively assess a candidate’s social media profile, quickly and effectively.

The background check result is then presented in an easy to interpret professional report, which helps protect an employer without breaching trust with the candidate, thereby supporting swifter recruitment decisions. We really do take the hard work away from employers.