The Case for Monitoring the Social Media of Student-Athletes

Twenty-five years ago, social media influencer wasn’t a career title, personal mistakes weren’t plastered online for the world to see, and communication wasn’t instantaneous and reactions even faster. In 2019, however, the world is well aware of how quickly information travels. While social media has provided us with an effective way to share products, memes, and opinions, it can also spotlight offensive behavior. According to Pew Research Center, in 2018, 88% of 18- to 29-year-olds…

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5 Questions for Selecting a Company to Perform Your Social Media Screenings

Social media screening is becoming part of the mainstream background check process, similar to criminal records, financial history, and credentials.  As evidence of how mainstream it has become CareersBuilders.com reported that 70% of employers use social media for candidate research. If you are considering using your staff (HR and recruiting professionals) to perform social media screening, there are numerous risks.   Not only can your company be questioned about bias, but this raises concerns of having…

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Lessons Learned While Building SM23’s Social Media Code of Conduct

As a new company, particularly one established to monitor and screen social media activity of potential candidates for employment, I felt it imperative that Social Media 23 should have a Social Media Code of Conduct for its employees.  Therefore, I set out on the journey to create such a Code of Conduct for Social Media 23. This article includes information about: How I went about the process, What I discovered about other organizations and institutions…

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How Social Media is used for Recruitment and Screening

Social Media usage for hiring has two distinct categories: recruitment and screening.  Each category yields value, but social media screening exposes risk to the hiring organization.  This article establishes the role of each category and provides methods to minimize social media screening risk. Recruiting According to SHRM, recruiting via social media is used, or will be used, by a staggering  93% of organizations.  That includes 84% of organizations currently using it and 9% planning to…

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3 Tips to Minimize Hiring Risk with Social Media Screening

Background screening commonly includes criminal, education, financial, professional certification, employment status, and other areas of a candidate’s history.  Social media is now joining the list of standard background checks. You don’t have to search very long to find many examples of social media history and behavior affecting employees and their employment status.  Sometimes, people have been fired from positions based on recently discovered social media posts of their past.  Others have lost jobs before they…

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3 Steps for removing bias in social media screening

Bias occurs in all areas of our lives and is especially prevalent in hiring.  With decades of study and action to eliminate it, bias remains an issue that haunts HR and hiring professionals. Vanderbilt University defines unconscious bias as “prejudice or unsupported judgments in favor of or against one thing, person, or group as compared to another, in a way that is usually considered unfair.”  Many researchers think unconscious bias occurs automatically, as the name…

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