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All’s Fair in Love and LinkedIn

June 2, 2011, 1:39 pm

By Allison M. Vaillancourt

Last spring I gave a presentation on social media and employment to about 100 people with hiring responsibilities. Wanting to get to know my audience, I asked a few questions. “How many of you use Facebook?” “Who has a LinkedIn profile?” “Anyone use Twitter?” I then moved on to the most important question, “How many of you use social-media accounts to screen candidates for employment?” With the exception of a guy from a background checking company, no one raised a hand. “Yeah, like I believe that,” I said to the group.

This business of using social media to check the backgrounds of employment candidates is pretty controversial stuff. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has warned about the potential for making biased decisions after checking social-media sites, and I’ve heard more than my fair share of employment attorneys proclaim that they should be off limits to hiring authorities and search committees, declarations that prompt me to wonder what universe they are living in. Likewise, I’ve heard candidates argue that what they post on their own sites is private and should never be evaluated by hiring officials. I find these positions astounding. Aren’t hiring authorities responsible for thoroughly evaluating candidates? Are we supposed to believe that candidates who demonstrate poor judgment online should be held harmless at all times?

One woman mentioned her distress at doing a Google search on a top finalist for a very senior position and finding a non-password-protected collection of photos of the finalist’s wife in her underwear. Apparently the finalist thought it would be fun to document his wife’s pregnancy by taking side-view photos of her for 35 weeks. “Are you sure it was really your candidate?” I asked. “I worried about that,” she responded, “but then we recognized his face from the nude photos of him participating in the underwater birth.”

This woman did something I always recommend: verify that the content you have uncovered truly belongs to your candidate. Here are some other practices to consider:

  1. Notify candidates that you will be conducting a comprehensive Internet search that includes social-media sites.
  2. Provide candidates with an opportunity to address issues related to identity and negative information. There is more than one Allison Vaillancourt on Facebook, and most of them seem to be having a lot more fun than I am. Make sure you have the right person before making judgments.
  3. Invite candidates to let you know about Internet content that may be inaccurate.
  4. Compare LinkedIn content to the candidate’s CV. Be nervous if the LinkedIn profile appears to exaggerate real experience or accomplishments.
  5. Be cognizant of the potential for discrimination or bias.
  6. Consider the nexus between the information you uncover and its relationship to the job. Underwater Birth Man was vying for an information-security position and the search team worried that he might not be a stellar role model.
  7. Pay attention to blog content. Should you hire someone who regularly rants about the inferiority of women, you can bet it will surface as Exhibit A if he is later charged with discrimination or sexual harassment.
  8. Be ethical. I hope most of us would agree that “friending” a candidate or one of the candidate’s friends in order to access personal information on Facebook is just plain sleazy.

    9. Does your institution have a protocol for evaluating candidates’ social-media content? Do you buy the argument that search committees have no right to consider Flickr photos, blogs or Twitter postings when making screening decisions?

This entry was posted in Administrative Hiring, Faculty Hiring, Interviewing. Bookmark the permalink.

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  • coco_rico

    This is suffocating. 

  • patrick_murtha

    It is as I have long theorized: When you go on “social media,” you may think you are socializing or networking, but all you are really doing is freely providing information that can be used against you in a highly competitive (and increasingly Orwellian) world. This is why I have never been on Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter; why I closed my LinkedIn account and privatized my LibraryThing account; why I shuttered my blog even though it was pseudonymous; why I’m rarely even commenting anymore. The world has gone mad, and the evidence mounts up around us every day. I mean, consider Weinergate. Consider this article. And shudder.

  • uwstaff

    “2 … There is more than one Allison Vaillancourt on Facebook, and most of them seem to be having a lot more fun than I am. Make sure you have the right person before making judgments.”

    Why make judgments at all about other people’s fun? 

  • mrmars

    The first thing I did upon reading the title of this article was check the date.  Upon verifying that it was June 2nd and not April fools day, I scanned the content just to the point of verifying that the author was serious (was she?).  I refuse to read something this absurd in more detail.  In the eons before facebook,etc. one hired a faculty candidate whose personality, judgement and sense of humor were then more fully revealed  (or not) by said individual over time at their discretion (or indiscretion).  

    Somehow academia managed to function regardless. 

    Snooping of the sort described here is unnecessary, the material “revealed” of questionable relevance or value, and, to me at least, would be distasteful in the extreme.

  • mathmaven

    Why would a man who found his wife’s pregnancy fascinating and participated actively in the birthing process be a poor role model?  I don’t find anything troubling in any of the online content described about this man at all.

  • liveyourlife

    Society should be aware that there is always the potential for someone to search for you in social media with or without your consent.  In this digital age you should never put anything online that you wouldn’t want discovered later on. 

  • singfasola

    Before I worked in academia I worked more than 30 year in the corporate world. Reference checks? What applicant would provide a reference who would give bad news? Employers will no longer divulge anything besides employment dates, for fear of lawsuits. There is so much resume fraud that it’s par for the course to look at LinkedIn to see if what’s posted there is reasonably close to the resume presented, to see if the profile was there prior to the date you posted the position, etc.

     The saying goes “When you put something on the internet, you send a postcard to the world.” Undergrad career services staff always tell students to purge or clean up their Facebook sites because employers will do internet searches.   I see no reason not to see how a candidate presents him/herself publicly. How I use what I find is what counts, and it’s a responsibility I take seriously.

    I pre-screen resumes to determine appropriate candidates for a number of positions.  I will not hold it against a candidate if I find nothing on LinkedIn but I do expect that the way the candidate presents him/herself on a social media site will be consistent with the application information. I would approach Flickr and Twitter with trepidation because there is such a possibility of spoofing there. Blogs? Case by case. 

    I heartily endorse the practices that Allison proposes.  (If you don’t think that candidates do internet and social media searches on your institution’s department heads and highly-placed administrators, you’re ill-informed.)

    If the appreciation and joy of pregnancy and birth distressed a search committee, that candidate was perhaps better off without the interview. 

  • vaillancourt_az

    My sense from the conversation was that the search committee was surprised that an IT pro who should be familiar with strategies to protect information would not have taken easy steps to limit access to certain photos. They probably assumed, wrongly, that the candidate failed to do so rather than assuming that he wanted the world to view his family pictures.

    Uptight search committee? Possibly. True story? Yep. I offer it only as a warning.

  • 609zr

    Anyone who has a position of standing (or not as I think about it) should avoid social media at all costs.  The author mentions that the EEOC “warns” about using social media.  This means nothing  without concrete legal language.  I avoid SNs, I refuse to converse electronically with people on Face Book for fear that my e-mail will end up on their site.  And, as a special note to the CHE, I immensely dislike DISQUS.  Talk about the “candidate’s postcards to the world.”  I want DISQUS removed immediately. 

    It seems fair game that if you broadcast yourself on the web, anyone including employers can read it.  Conversely, I search every blog I can find about a potential academic position.  Some universities have so much bad publicity that you don’t have to look hard to find negative print.  Others, however, don’t get much negative press, but once your there…. 

    Some advise.  One, if you are going overseas, read the American Embassy report about the country in question.  Two, read the student blogs about their campus.  Three, read the faculty list on the university’s website.  Maybe you know someone who knows someone.  Four,  check the university’s turnover rate.  If the university is hiring someone new every year or two, you do not want to work there.

  • totoro

    I can’t see anything wrong with the pregnancy photos. But this just goes to show how weird some search committees might be.

  • purvi899

     The reality is that social media is a publishing medium. If you post something online, you intend an audience. When used effectively, social media can be a great way to engage, and market yourself.

  • minnesotan

    Because some academics don’t think “fun” that ends face down in a gutter needs necessarily be advertised to the rest of the profession.

  • panacea

    Crap like this is why I blog under a pseudonym. 

    There’s next to nothing on the Internet under my real name.

  • bristol64

    It would be wise to remember this works both ways.  As a candidate, I have checked out the social media profiles of people with whom I would likely work if offered a position for which I was interviewing.

  • crankycat

    I DON’T look up candidates on these sites – that’s rude and intrusive! More like peeping in someone’s windows than a truly professional evaluation. 

  • michener1

    There is a lot of palaver around the rightness, wrongness, relevance or ethics of using SN’s. blogs, etc. to make decisions on a candidate. But in the end its just lazy! 

    Somehow the vast majority of current academic and corporate positions were filled without social networks being a factor. It is likely that no member serving on an employment search committee as of this date had their personal lives checked in the same manner as is now being done. Now that we all have an internet footprints, perhaps previous to committee assignment executives, faculty and professional staff should  have their SN’s, blogs, electronic communications, etc. scoured so that their promotions, currently held positions, and tenure can be reevaluated.  While SNs are not secure, they are also not open. While a case can easily be made for reviewing Linked In, one must exert more than normal effort to see your FB posts and pictures (depending on how it is set up). Friending people or people you have in common, to gain access or viewing pictures posted by someone other than the candidate on which they are tagged goes way beyond unethical. Looking at SN’s to mine information is like listening in on conversations as people pass by, seeing someone at a pub with their friends being less than professional on their time off, or viewing someone’s open mail or pictures left on their desk after they’ve left the room. Would anyone consider those activities fair or ethical methods of evaluating a candidate? Why not hire hackers to get the candidates emails as well, since apparently nothing electronic is private? There is a difference between reasonable research and snooping. I’d expect the highly educated to know and do better.

  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/cshunt312 Courtney Hunt

    Though Allison’s post is generally reasonable, I am glad to see some of the pushback from commenters. Social media platforms and activities should not be treated homogeneously. Facebook, in particular, is intended by most people for personal, private activity and should be respected as such by prospective employers. If there are specific, job-related concerns that need to be addressed before an offer is made, there are ways of conducting proper background checks that don’t create new risks in the effort to manage others.

    Last fall I wrote a white paper that addresses the issue of “social screening” fairly comprehensively. It’s entitled “Social Screening: Candidates – and Employers – Beware,” and can be accessed via http://tiny.cc/SocialScreeningPaper. I’ve created a few new arguments in response to recent events (e.g., an ACLU complaint against an employer in Maryland) that I’ll incorporate into an updated version of the paper.

    Folks may also be interested in a related post I wrote entitled “Social Media Policies: Necessary but not Sufficient,” which can be accessed via http://tiny.cc/SMinOrgsPolicyPost.

    I am happy to answer questions.   

  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/cshunt312 Courtney Hunt
  • mbelvadi

    What’s your objection to DISQUS?  I admit to being a little surprised to find that people could see not only what I posted but also exactly which articles I “liked”, but I didn’t have any expectation of privacy on that.  Long before DISQUS I had noticed that my CHE posted comments were findable in Google, so I don’t think DISQUS changed that.

  • mbelvadi

    This kind of research predates the social media. Savvy candidates, pre-Facebook, knew to use their library’s “newspapers full text database” to see if articles had been written about the institution they were applying for, or even specific administrators etc., in the hometown newspaper for the place they were applying to. Even with social media, I recommend this alternative research tool as many small-town newspapers are not well presented/archived online for Google to find, but are available in a library-licensed database with a high quality search engine like LexisNexis or Newscan sitting on top of them.

  • dochalladay

    I think an important point to remember here is that, regardless of whether the committee SHOULD look at these sites, someone inevitably WILL do it. If not a member of the committee, then a student curious about an announced visiting candidate. I spent the last year on the job market (first time ever, having just completed my doctorate), and I assumed that people would be checking out my Facebook page. Whether we think it’s fair for committees to look us up or not, we should assume they are going to do so and prepare accordingly.

  • http://twitter.com/sjgsearch Spelman & Johnson

    While search committees do have a right to look at publicly available
    information, we always encourage all institutions to have a protocol for
    evaluating candidate’s social media content that includes ethical and
    legal considerations, as well as measures for eliminating potential
    discrimination or bias.

    Separating the search and decision-making
    functions regarding social media, can go a long way in reducing bias.
    Notifying candidates that your review will include internet searches and
    social media accounts, and considering all information found in strict
    context to the position – as noted in this article – are also key to an ethical social media
    evaluation.

    We wrote a related blog post
    “Screening with Social Media: Intrusive or Savvy?” a little while back, that includes other
    useful guidelines to consider when developing your institutional social
    media protocol, for anyone interested in reading more about this issue…

    http://spelmanandjohnson.com/blog/index.php/screening-with-social-media-intrusive-or-savvy/

  • kellycooper2

    I am on LinkedIn. And this past year I was a candidate for hiring. On my LinkedIn there was a steady stream of Anonymous LinkedIn users. And the same days I saw Anonymous LinkedIn users, LinkedIn offered Potential People I May Know. And those people were in the departments of universities I applied to. The pattern was pretty clear.

    Taking a look at this post in reverse. I looked at the those recommended people and saw misspelled words, odd notes, and was surprised by their lack of professionalism, in some cases.

    Two quick comments: I teach web development. I talk with students about their public and their private persona. Private does not belong  on the web.

    And yet, one major surprise for me this year was how many universities are looking for “well known” faculty. Teaching, writing, and a “nationally recognized name”. Seems we’re also a bit in the marketing business. And, if so, sites like LinkedIn do provide the opportunity for a managed form of networking.

    If we are not “connected” we are well within our rights and are probably smarter about this business. And we are probably not getting interviews.

    Either way, we should use our real name.

  • http://twitter.com/Teresaneal Teresa Neal

    Mine either.  I have never used my real name on the Internet.  A couple of organizations I belong to, including my current job, have put my real name along with my work…nothing personal or embarrassing.  However, there are at least four others with my exact name.  One of them is a high school swim coach.  One is a furniture-refinishing enthusiast.  (Perhaps the same person as the high school swim coach.) One is a Mennonite baker.  One is a Filipina who received my exact name by marriage.  

    What are the chances two people with the same rare first-and-last-name combination will live in the same city?  Pretty good, actually.  The Memphis library got our library cards mixed up when two of us lived in Memphis.  And now that I live in Kansas City, the mom-and-pop video store (may it rest in peace) was always getting me mixed up with a man whose full name was only one letter different from mine.  

    I like to google-stalk an ex of mine with an equally rare name.  Would you believe there are two of him in Minneapolis-St. Paul in the same profession?  

    For that matter, there are two economic book authors named Robert Frank and they write about the same topics!  One wrote _Richistan_ and the other wrote _Luxury Fever._  Imagine my confusion when listening to _Richistan_ on Audiobook and the first Robert Frank quotes the second Robert Frank.

  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/cshunt312 Courtney Hunt

    This week I wrote two posts on the topics of social recruiting and social screening. Here are links to each:

    Social Screening of Job Candidates: Focusing on the Facts

    http://tiny.cc/SocialScreeningFacts

    Social Media and Recruiting 101: Overview and Recommendations

    http://tiny.cc/SocialRecruiting101

  • ellis

    OMG, UA.

  • rpm13

    There is an obvious lack of accountability here. The assessment vice-president needs to get on this right away and require that the building objectives be assessed to make sure that they contained the proper “action words,” that the building objectives were put in writing on the syllabus given to the architects, and that they are measureable using the same rubrics used by the University of Southerrn California and other campuses with a lot of buildings. Otherwise, how could we compare whether buildings at Belmont University are actually helping the university increase revenue compared to other universities? If something doesn’t look right, the president needs to exercise strong leadership and fire somebody before building the building. Finally, the entire university communications operation needs to make sure that the truth is never again made public in such a naked manner.

  • graddirector

    The president of Belmont should be fired.  No small college can afford to spend so much money in such a trivial way.  Academic buildings are not typically that interchangable, the needs of the theater department are completely different than that of Chemistry which is different from that of English.  It sounds like this poor university will be saddled with a building that “fits nothing right”.

    That said, we are so short on academic space for all activities at my institution, I would probably be grateful for anything they did, including additional classrooms.  Of course, my department would be most deserving though :) That would let us hire more professors to get our average class size down below 70 students although I guess that would not help without the new classrooms.to offer the classes in….  Catch 22

  • electronicmuse

    Hey, simple!

    Use it as a meeting place where the public can have photo ops and autographs of your famous students.

  • manoflamancha

    Take the cash and buy GOLD, and defer the unenlightened building until needed.

  • kerrykind

    A $48 million investment in search of a purpose?  Doesn’t seem to speak well for Belmont’s master planning process.  There must be a lot more to this.

  • kingericred4ever

    I think they should build an institute that will create weed that doesn’t look or smell like weed so the next time Willie Nelson’s tour bus gets pulled over by some overzealous state troopers he won’t get arrested for possession. Also they should develop another flavor of pop tart that’s just as awesome as Brown Sugar Cinnamon without, of course, it being Brown Sugar Cinnamon part 2. And a brewpub or since this is a university they should call it the Albert Gore Jr. institute for Beer . Tennessee is seriously starved for good beer.

  • hoodlib

    Center for e-Learnin’

  • Babagranny

    If it really is in the middle of the campus, how about five stories of parking below and five stories of parking above, with a vendor on each ground-level corner:  Starbucks, a collegiate clothing outlet, snacks and ice cream, and trade books.

  • http://www.facebook.com/Charlie.Rand Charles Rand

    How about moving the parking spaces to the school in Canada that doesn’t have enough parking.
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/tweed/professor-abandons-his-eternal-search-for-a-parking-space/28959

  • 12080243

    Colleagues in my department claimed that good journals won’t publish research from a Tier IV school. They had been unsuccessful and didn’t expect success. I was fortunate in my efforts and my research was published in some of the best journals in our discipline.

    Rejections are a normal part of the research/publication process, but many of the reviews I received were clearly incompetent. The reviewers accepted the assignments but demonstrated that they had no expertise in the methods I/we applied, didn’t read the entire papers, and/or the comments were unrelated to any ideas in the papers. That’s life; we can’t expect a perfect process; it’s merely a peer review process. A suggestion: if you are considering reviewing a paper and are not competent in the method or topic, do us all a favor and don’t accept the assignment.

    An area we all need to improve is with regard to reviewing research on controversial topics. And I’m not referring to critical papers within a particular established paradigm. Peer reviewed journals fail in the review process of controversial research.

    Chauncey M. DePree, Jr., DBA, Professor, School of Accountancy, University of Southern Mississippi

  • 3rdtyrant

    I’m sure we all know, having done this before, that it is utterly an act
    of altruism.  Universities don’t allow time for it, there is professional value inasmuch as a person reads something interesting
    (usually) and gets to participate in the discipline, but in the end, the
    net yield is somewhat intangible (i.e. participation in the
    discipline, being part of the scholarly conversation), and therefore a thing that
    administrators cannot measure, even though it is a very valuable and
    important service/experience. It’s immeasurableness makes it anathema to the modern bottom-liners who run our institutions, and thus we are left to do it on our own time, between drafts of an article, grading papers, & c.

    I’m happy to referee, and try to do a very good job for the sake of the profession, but it sounds like I’m in the minority, and editors are not knocking down my door to get my help, either.

  • over30yrsatit

    I agree that there are few direct rewards for reviewing. However, I learn a lot about my discipline and about my research area by reading the work others are doing. Although some of the papers I review contribute little to my understanding of my area or any others, some others inform me of new directions or perhaps of relevant research I have not found on my own. I like to review because I like to know about directions research may be taking — although my department chair told me not to bother because it doesn’t really “count.”

  • profslw

    Above and beyond being overworked, the issue of compensation is central to the problem. Why should we spend precious time working for free for a journal that charges my institution (and all others) about $1000 for an annual subscription? However, it is not professorial greed at work here — I am sure that more and more professors will be reviewing for the free online journals because that is felt to be “academic philanthropy”. We’re all in this together to help each other out, but not if someone else makes money from our efforts. Ask yourselves this: if you were asked by Wikipedia (open source and free to all) and the Encyclopedia Britannica (paid subscription) to write an entry without compensation, in your field of expertise, for which would you be more willing to do so? The answer provides the main factor behind the declining number of reviewers for the paid subscription journals.

  • lr_ed

    I think, profmomof1 has said it all! From the point of a non-profit, open access editor, I can only add that the situation is as bad as anywhere. Referees don’t seem to scheme against big commercial companies…

  • ProfUK

    I fully subscribe to the view of profslw. I am regularly approached to review and have made it a rule of thumb to do so only where I get paid for doing it. After all, if I am in possession of certain expertise, it is normal to expect that it is appreciated and that this appreciation finds a monetary expression.  I recently had to consult a lawyer who charged me £350 for an hour-long consultation; the rate of my expertise, in contrast, is much lower (if I can get it recognized, that is).
    In practice I reject about half of the approaches (those that do not offer to pay) and review half (only the paid ones), which is a decent balance. I am quite conscientious in reviewing and normally do it quite swiftly, as it is business and not voluntarily-inflicted stress. 
    I believe that the solution to the problem described here is to give recognition to the whole “grey economy” of peer reviewing. If properly paid for, expertise will be readily available. Last week a Canadian government body told me they cannot pay for my reviewing time; most Universities in the UK pay a fee of about £150 for reading and examining a doctoral thesis (minimum three full days work), I can go on quite a bit longer…I simply reject being treated this way and paid a pittance for my expertise. 

  • craigherndon

    How do we discourage sea turtle from eating these? Right now they’re having a terrible time with their attraction to plastic bags.

  • curmudgeon58

    At the expense of being flippant, will the final version sting?

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