Social Media Employment Background Checks – How To Remove a Hurdle for Your Employment Success

Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter and many other social media networking websites have taken a place of a joy ride; everyone is using this social phenomenon when they need a break from their work. I suppose for many in this increasingly virtual world having a chat with a cyber friend brings some meaning, if not a respite from the grind of work.

Yet, I am stunned at the time that my social network friends spend on these sites—they must be spending many hours every day posting goofy photos, useless links, and smarmy comments about others. If only their bosses knew.

Actually, their bosses do know. Increasingly companies are monitoring the behavior of employees through social media employment background checks and monitoring, who post regularly on the social networks.

Human Resources with the help from the guys in IT can data mine the social media networking websites to find prospective employees. Additionally, they can function as a data source for social media employment background checks, so beware what you post. The world is watching.

Employers are keen to know about your social media background and they are checking it on a seven point comprehensive criteria. The only way to survive social media employment background checks is to know how employers are going to look over your social media networking profiles. This is how you can get your next job hunt success and this is how you can survive at your current employment.

Seven Point Criteria for Social Media Employment Background Checks by Employers:

1. Corporate Disparagement: Employers are looking for a person who is involved in bad mouthing about a company; they are focusing on a pattern of negative comments made by an employee for its current and past workplace and or about his/her past or current work mates.
2. Tendency towards Violent Behavior: In social media search, often times people are found to be expressing themselves in very violent ways and about violent acts. And employers don’t want a violent person at their workplace which can jeopardize the peaceful work environment.
3. The Indication of Drug Use: We certainly found examples where people talk about smoking marijuana or being involved in the drugs in a way that really isn’t appropriate like an underage person drinking. Employers are keen to know about it.
4. Poor Judgment: There are things like where people are talking on their Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or other social media sites about doing things that really show poor judgment in the way they think about stuff and that certainly is the thing employers want to avoid.
5. Racist or Anti Social Behavior: Unfortunately, there are people like that, that express themselves rather aggressively in the social media environment and they talk about hating other groups, hating individuals because they are part of those groups. Hating your religious or sexual orientation of some kind. Typically this is not kind of a person they want to have as their employee and that’s another social media employment background checks criterion.
6. Inappropriate Sexual Behavior: This is one of the areas where people sometime feel differently about one way or another. The definition of inappropriate is something that you really want to define very clearly. But if people are going way over the line, the obvious things like child pornography and other type of sexually explicit content and there is an evidence of such doing then an employer will surely use it as a social media background checks criterion to screen you out of employment.
7. Honesty and Integrity: And that’s what it is really all about, if people are talking about ripping off the company or stealing a hotdog from a street vendor when he was not looking, or something like that and bragging about it in their social media site, this is probably not someone who is going to get hired by an employer.

These seven points are the basic criterion for the social media employment background checks that employers are now considering for their hiring process and they are certainly help them to screen out their best employee in such a scarce employment situation.

Sponsor Ads

• Ad Space Available - Rent it Now!

Report this Page

Created on Dec 31st 1969 18:00. Viewed 0 times.

Share on APSense

Comments

James Berg   Software Developer Now a days, most popular social media networking for online business is Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin etc. These are all backbone of social networking. Great thought. Aug 10th 2011 03:00

Otoabasi Umonting   Marketing Consultant & Coach Interesting post; I always knew there was going to be something like this soon. The rate at which people are using social platforms for undesirable activities have increased greatly. I reckon employers are on their game now, to root out anyone who's trying to stir up trouble. Aug 10th 2011 04:24

Robert Bridge   Social Media Management, traffic to website, searc Great conclusion like the tip about aligning with a decent charity, good informative and tidy post, helpful, thanks. Aug 10th 2011 07:08

Andrey V.   moneymaker.) Yes, now you can learn about a lot of people used the internet and communicate in social networks. Aug 10th 2011 17:22