It's all about character

Social networking sites offer employers a cost-effective private investigator

Editorial by Sean Fitzgerald

 How difficult is it to discover information about someone in this social networking age of Web 2.0? With just a few minutes spent clicking through most search engines, you can learn about a person’s education, their family, their sexual preference, medical challenges they might currently be enduring, even the events and activities that person is looking forward to this coming weekend, or the foibles they experienced while out at the bars last night.

As more and more of your neighbors, friends, co-workers, the boy calling your daughter at 10:30 p.m., and distant relatives join social networking tools like Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, the capability to stay in-the-know about the daily developments of hundreds of millions of people is at your fingertips.

An invasion of privacy? Well, personal social networking accounts are broadcast on the Internet, where even a dairy farmer in the Chinese province of Guangdong can access the information.

How about an employer using the information on these social networking sites for human resource purposes? Certainly legal. Ethical? Or even tacky? The jury is still out on that decision.

Until news broke in early March that an employee of the Philadelphia Eagles NFL franchise was fired for comments made on Facebook, little public discussion has occurred around the use of social networking by employers in making both hiring and firing decisions.

But it is becoming a more common practice as part of the due diligence human resource professionals conduct for potential new hires. In fact, some employers right here in the Fox Valley use these social networking sites to pre-screen job applicants, for example. 

Discovering how a particular job applicant behaves on Facebook, as an example one Fox Cities human resource professional gave me, offers what she believes is a reasonable indication of how that job applicant acts in the workplace. And if the job applicant is applying for a position that has a high profile within the company or any level of visibility out in the community, she said the company likes to ensure there aren’t a litany of embarrassing photos and comments posted on such sites that might come back to haunt the employer down the road.

Yet another company in the Fox Cities – a call center operation – terminated one of its employees for photos posted on the employee’s Facebook page which showed the employee at work with his computer screen in the background fully displaying customer data. That’s a no-no in a call center environment, and broadcasting the photo and the customer information out on the Web only worsened the potential of the situation.

Having some doubts about whether a particular employee really is sick or not? Check them out on Twitter to review their updates and see if they’re really at home in bed nursing their sniffles or went down to Miller Park for an afternoon Brewers game.

Have a problem with an employee and looking for some concrete evidence to build a lawsuit-proof case for their termination? Look up their MySpace page and read through their blogs. Any comments which might demonstrate a poor representation of the company – or even any negative comments about the employer – would lock up a firing with little to no gray area whatsoever.

Are there potential pitfalls to doing your own investigative work on social networking sites? Certainly. Employers should be cautious about potential discrimination based upon information discovered on such a site, such as identifying an individual’s religious beliefs or sexual orientation. Employers should also recognize that information contained on an individual’s social networking page might not be accurate, and may not have necessarily been posted by the individual them self. And lastly, if employees know you’re checking into their Facebook or MySpace page on a random basis, it might leave a bad taste in their mouth.

Just because it’s legal to track an employee or potential employee’s character using a social networking site doesn’t necessarily mean it’s acceptable in the culture of your workplace. In fact, every single one of the northeast Wisconsin companies who’ve mentioned their use of social networking sites for human resource purposes asked not to specifically be mentioned by name in an article on the subject.

But as the practice becomes more widespread, employees and job applicants alike will be more attuned to the fact that there’s little guarantee of privacy or control once information, photos or videos are posted out on the vast range of the World Wide Web.