Experts: Tread Lightly Searching Social Media in Hiring Process

When Maureen De Armond, associate counsel at Iowa State University, gave a presentation recently about whether to use social media to conduct background checks on prospective hires, she began with two slides that gave opposite bits of advice.

The first slide warned: “Don’t do it. Cyberstalking job applicants. No way.”

However, the next slide advised: “Do it. Google Happens. Ignoring online data is a mistake.”

­Those two diametrically opposed directives represent one of the biggest dilemmas that human resources officials face in the digital age as they seek to hire candidates and must decide what — if anything — they should consider from an applicant’s online profile and activities on social media.

Hiring guidelines

“­There’s no easy answer to it,” says William “Bill” R. Pokorny, a Chicago-based labor attorney and a member of the National Association of College and University Attorneys, or NACUA.

“It’s a tool and there’s good ways to use it and there’s bad ways to use it,” Pokorny says, regarding the use of social media in the hiring process. “You have to know what you’re doing.”