Attorney Lester Rosen, founder and CEO of background check firm Employment Screening Resources® (ESR), “presented how to successfully use social media for recruiting or background screening” at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) 2017 Talent Management Conference and Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, according to a Workforce Magazine article about Rosen’s presentation.
“Social media allows employers to look under the hood to who a candidate really is,” said Rosen, author of ‘The Safe Hiring Manual’ and a frequent speaker on due diligence issues at conferences nationwide. “But if you use it incorrectly, there’s a world of privacy and discrimination problems that could arise.” Rosen made three presentations during the SHRM conference that took place from April 24 to 26, 2017.
“Social media should not be a tool that allows you to stop someone from getting to the interview stage because you found information that’s not a valid predictor of job performance,” Rosen told the SHRM audience. He also said employers need to be aware of Too Much Information (TMI) with social media or they may “become knowledgeable of factors that should not be considered for employment purposes.”
A survey released by SHRM in 2016 – ‘Using Social Media for Talent Acquisition—Recruitment and Screening’ (PDF) – found 56 percent of organizations said online profiles of job candidates could not indicate work-related performance. Also, 84 percent of organizations used social media to recruit candidates, and 82 percent of those firms said the top reason was to recruit passive job candidates. FULL ARTICLE