I’m Sorry I Stalked You on Facebook; I’m A Hiring Manager Now

In the digital age, anything can happen in the blink of an eye. The Internet boom created several new careers, job fields, and sectors. Moreover, with many new opportunities worldwide, people are tearing at the seams to score one of these coveted positions.

However, when there is a will, an HR recruiter shows an applicant the door for racist jokes they posted because the applicant wanted to be edgy. The same Internet people have treasured for the past decade for their livelihoods now face the backlash from the same Internet that put them in those positions. The thesis for this proposal is that human resource managers should use social media to screen job applicants, with some expectations.

Companies have been using social media screening since the 2010s. They started using it for recruitment purposes, which they still use today. Now they have expanded their searches to something more personal; social media profiles. Jeff Williams, VP of enterprise and HR solutions at Paychex says, "It's 2023, and what is posted on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter—and even Facebook for the nostalgic—is an accessible, noninvasive way of gaining insight on your candidate. You're accessing information that anyone can see,"

With the increased scrutiny put on every decision and the instant gratification of social media, someone's whole life taken instantly.

Furthermore, a company can lose value or even close down within the exact second.

The extremes of how social media could affect life are that it only takes one post from one person to spread a bad reputation over the Internet; this can damage someone's image and a company's overall brand.

So to reduce the risk of that happening, they scan someone's profiles to see how someone interacts with others, behaves in group forums, deal with problem-solving, and more.

There is one flaw in this, and that is the idea of privacy. Is it wrong to oversee a future employee's life and judge them based on what they do after hours? That is a debatable issue, and people will see that some situations justify the need for employers to vet/pre-screen future employers' and current employees' social media profiles.

The ideas and beliefs of privacy we, in American society, have created for ourselves are baseless when websites phones and track someone's every move with/without consent.

Pre-screening social media is an active/progressive move on the company's part to prevent inner turmoil. But what does a company do if they don't have a policy in place? "In cases where a company does not have policies regarding social media usage for hiring purposes, hiring managers should initiate discussions with human resources to establish clear guidelines and prevent potential pitfalls," says Emma Williams, a certified strengths and career coach and the chief research officer at HIGH5 Test, where she leads HR, coaching and research programs.

Companies do this daily already, so why not make it the gold standard for every company to improve our workplace's overall structures? Evaluating someone's social media profiles is not a privacy issue or a First Amendment issue; this is a safety and security solution for all in the workforce-past, present and future.

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