Do you search social media of a potential employee?

[Japanese2024]

A friend of mine works in HR. Lately I have found her to be very gossipy/talking badly about other friends etc and it's getting my back up.

Today she told me they won't be hiring someone because they searched her Facebook in the office and it's all about being drunk/hungover/badly spelt words etc. She was talking about it like gossip, saying she can't believe someone would post like that. Surely that's not OK, do people actually not hire someone for a private search of their social media? The job is with kids and my friend seems to think the woman shouldn't post that but it's her private business!

Yabu - friend is right. This is quite normal to do

Yanbu - someone hiring shouldn't judge on social media

I think it was based on her being local and having the same name, so seemed very likely it was her. They search every potential employee but it feels like they do it for gossip like 'oh look at her nice husband, oh she's got kids' etc

Keeping Children Safe in Education (government rules) says schools should consider online searches as part of thier due diligence for short listed candidates when doing safer recruitment checks.

So its literally advised to do this.

Shouldn't gossip about it though.

I have two Facebook accounts. A public one that I use to promote things like my son’s band gigs & fundraising I’m involved in that I want to go to asxwideca reach as possible and a very locked down private one that only select friends are on.

a lot of teacher friends don’t have their surnames on their accounts.

Old person, here, recently recruiting (no pay) trustees to our charity. Of course you google people!

Other search engines are available.

It just seems really negative to me. This woman could be a decent person/have changed since these posts and it's hard to hear people are spoken (gosspied) about because they simply applied for a job

I always check when hiring to my team.

You sound like someone I'd want to work with / for.

Our school does this. Candidates know and it's done by me or someone else in the office who is not connected with the recruitment decision. Our job is to check specified platforms and look for anything that raises safeguarding concerns, could damage reputation of school or anything that contradicts what they have said on their application form and we just report back on what we have checked and whether anything in those categories came up or not, but the details of their personal life not relevant to the job aren't known by the decision makers.

I cleaned up my social media in anticipation of this. My social media isn’t even in my surname but you never know how searches get you somewhere these days.

My current employees didn’t, there’s a huge interesting fact of my life I fully expected them to raise 😛

Does anyone know how to take your surname off a FB account ? I've tried but I can't seem to do it .

She needs to make her social media private.

I don’t know if HR at my work do it but I know the partners do.

I do think it’s wrong of your friend to gossip about it to you.

Work and social media don't mix. Either when applying for work, or just carrying it out.

I have always kept my FB to friends only, and I didn't have any colleagues as FB friends. Not even the ones I'd worked with for years, and loved. For starters it's impossible to accept friend requests from some colleagues and not others. Far easier to say 'sorry, I don't have colleagues on FB' and stick to it.

I compartmentalised my work life and home life. Yes, my team and I would chat about our lives and our partners and kids, but my friends and social life were my business and I didn't want colleagues having a window into how I spent my spare time. There were way too many gossips who might read my FB posts and spin them into something more juicy or simply just be nosy.

@saraclara

I've learned to search for colleagues and block them . Same for people I don't like outside of work. I don't have a facial profile picture or display my home town on my SM profile.

Always and Google them too.

If they are stupid enough to post anything that they don't want publicly known, then why would an employer not take advantage of that.

Not coming practice in the 3 large employers I have recruited for. My team wouldn't have time to do it.

Even if the posts don't reflect her current lifestyle, if she's silly enough to leave those posts publicly visible, she has failed the "does this person have common sense" test.

Seriously, if your clients look up your employees, what do you want them to find? You want them to find very little, and anything they do find has to look professional. No business wants its representatives to have a messy social media presence.

Also, your friend didn't name this person, so it's not really gossip, is it? You don't know who they are talking about.

i think thats the thing sometimes with how an image is presented etc, theres no way to know if thats an old personality or the current one

If HR can check your social media and find your posts about getting drunk etc (however far in the past) so can clients/colleagues/pupils/parents/patients etc.

So yes, I agree with it being a 'failure of common sense' check.

Yes we do this (I hire a lot)
i only really look at recent stuff, I think yay if locked down, if not a quick scan.
only twice I’ve let it influence the interview
once was a guys page littered with guns/ knives and extremely innapropirate language- think BNP rants.
once a woman’s where is was clear from photos she did pole dancing (in little clothing).
my colleague thought that was a no, I pushed to offer and interview.
the gin/ knife guy didn’t get offered an interview. The woman did but didn’t show up.

What do you mean by "how searches get you somewhere these days"?

And are you saying that the people who now work for you failed to search your SM before you cleaned it up?

So what if you aren't on SM? Do they accept that, or do they assume that you have something to hide/are being deliberately elusive?

I was on SM for a little while, after I got my first ever smartphone, but I quickly found it vexatious to the soul and just stopped engaging with it completely - I 'ghosted' FaceBook, if you will.

You use your middle name as your surname

@Comefromaway

I can't seem to reset my name on FB.

I look for SM belonging to potential employees. For me it isn't always about what, specifically, is on there, more that people having open social media profiles indicates a lack of common sense, and I have to consider that when I'm employing people to work with vulnerable individuals where keeping things confidential is paramount.