More companies are scouring job candidates’ online personas for racist and other red-flag comments. While it seems simple, it hasn’t kept social-media trails from morphing into hiring minefields, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The New York Times has become the latest employer to grapple with a public furor after announcing last week it hired journalist Sarah Jeong as a technology writer for its editorial board. Defending its hire, the newspaper said in a written statement that it knew about Jeong’s tweets before hiring her and that “she understands that this type of rhetoric is not acceptable at The Times.”
Last month, Walt Disney Co. cut ties with “Guardians of the Galaxy” director James Gunn after years-old, inflammatory tweets of his were resurfaced. In recent weeks, three Major League Baseball players apologized for unearthed racist and antigay tweets written during their high-school days.
With job recruits’ social-media histories readily available, more employers are trying to head off or prepare for such controversies, especially with high-profile hires. In a 2017 survey of more than 2,300 hiring managers and human-resources executives by jobs website CareerBuilder, 70% said they screened candidates’ social-media histories—up from 60% the previous year. One-third said they had found discriminatory comments that caused them not to hire someone.
Yet social-media screening remains one the murkiest aspects of the hiring process, according to experts in employment law and human resources.
Both too little and too much scouring present legal and reputational pitfalls, they say. And though many employers have firm policies on whether to test for drug use or conduct criminal-record checks, fewer have consistent guidelines on how they vet and assess prospective employees’ online histories.
“It’s really all across the board,” says Jason Hanold, whose executive-search firm Hanold Associates specializes in recruiting human-resources executives. “And it’s often determined by the proclivities of the individual” in charge.
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Old social-media posts upending hiring process
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