Social Media is creating quite the stir for businesses on multiple levels and bringing up a lot of questions that haven’t had to be answered in the past.  There is the challenge of how an organization can use social media to boost sales, how it can be used effectively for customer service, how to not only institute policies and governance for your employees but then how to enforce these rules. And then there is the question of ethics and acceptable usage in the hiring process.

Many human resource departments consider it unethical to Google a potential recruit.  I don’t really understand this position mainly because each candidate has a fairly decent level of control over what information exists about them in social media.  If a candidate chooses to put something out there, why would you, as a human resource employee, have an obligation not to look at it?  I understand that there are times when things may appear about an individual that he or she doesn’t want on the web, but it is possible to take steps to remove these things, or at the very least, hide them from view.  My position is that if you put it out there, I’m going to read it and I don’t see how that is unethical.  I also use common sense and understand that it is the internet and you can’t believe everything you read.

That being said, I do think it is absolutely unethical to try to “friend” someone for the purpose of being nosy and attempting to learn things that are none of your business.  A candidate may feel obligated to accept a request whether they want to or not to get a job and that is not a fair position for the candidate to be in.  There is a line between things that are work related and things that are personal and using your “power” to cross over that line and use personal information to screen someone’s ability to do a job is wrong.

Maybe the issue isn’t as simple as whether it is ethical or not, but whether the intention when it is used, is ethical. This creates a whole new challenge.  If an hr person is viewing the accessible information for the purpose of getting the “dirt” on someone, that is wrong.  But if he or she is doing research in the hopes of finding documentation that supports the information they’ve been given by candidates or seen on a resume, I just don’t see a problem with this.  So how in the world can you assess this with your hiring managers?

Even given the issues surrounding the ethical usage of these platforms for screening candidates, isn’t a large part of this whole equation the candidate’s responsibility?  Where is the accountability?  Is it with the person who is doing the reading, or with the person who is announcing their personal information all over the web? 

I vote that each potential hire is an adult capable of making choices.  If he or she chooses to call in sick to go to the beach and announces it on Twitter, or chooses to bad mouth their colleagues on Facebook but NOT ensure that this information is not viewable by anyone in the free world, I am not going to feel bad about reading it.  And it will color my impression of the candidate in a professional sense.  This provides a lot of relevant information about this candidate that I would have to take into consideration.  At the very least, he or she is irresponsible in using social media at all, whether due to ignorance or just plain lacking the common sense.  Edit yourself!  This is not an ethical concern for me but a responsibility concern for the interviewee.  Although common sense by the reader does come into play here as well.  Was it one tweet out of a hundred?  Or is there a constant stream of disparaging remarks about the employer or the co-workers?

What do you think?  Do you use these tools when screening potential hires?  Do you feel bad about it if you do?  Should candidates be held accountable for what exists about them in the world of social media?  Are you obligated not to use these tools for ethical reasons?  Do you have hiring managers on your staff that use social media for the purpose of evil rather than good?  How do you handle that if you suspect that is what’s happening?