Social Media Screening |
Jessica Veal |
Reading Time: 2 minutes
More than half of employers (51%) admit to having experienced bad publicity and/or staff related issues due to a lack of social media screening – and yet more than a third don’t have a social media policy in place.
Our research shows that, overall, businesses strongly recognise the potential damage social media behaviour can have on their reputation (72%) – and yet less than two thirds (64%) have a specific employment policy providing guidelines on how their workforce should behave online.
This is part of The Changing Face of Background Screening, a new study looking into the issues and challenges businesses are facing when it comes to the recruitment and retention of new skills in the post-pandemic world. We asked almost 300 businesses about their attitudes towards, and current levels of engagement in, pre-employment screening practices.
The study also found a similar proportion (58%) of businesses say they are monitoring the social media activity of their workforce online and 61% admit they are seeing more employees behaving inappropriately online.
Rupert Emson, CEO at Vero, said: “We know from our work with business clients across the globe that the popularity of pre-employment social media screening, as a means of gaining a deeper understanding of a candidate on how they conduct themselves in everyday life, is most certainly on the rise.
“What the research shows us, however, is that many organisations still aren’t responding quickly enough to ongoing developments within the world of social media, which continues to be a rapidly progressive and transformational form of human interaction.”
“A majority of employers today do agree that comprehensive social media screening results in better quality hires, and are generally averse to recruiting candidates displaying adverse behaviour during the social media screening process,” Rupert continued.
“Unfortunately, this still isn’t resulting in the checking of social media activity becoming a routine part of the recruitment process on a wide-scale basis, or indeed a core part of a candidate’s subsequent employment experience in general either.”
The whitepaper has also seen just 26% of businesses admit to regularly using social media background screening checks, even though 67% agree it results in better quality hires, and 66% claim they would decline to recruit a candidate if something adverse was uncovered in the process.
It also found that a majority of businesses today do agree background screening in general is a fundamental part of how an organisation is perceived by others, but only 3 in 5 are routinely screening 75% or more of their workforce and/or suppliers overall.
Rupert said: “Social media is just one of the many areas of a person’s life that have become more remote from would-be employers in the post-pandemic working world, while the need for speed, flexibility and most importantly security within the recruitment process has in many ways never been greater.
“And, while it’s true employers across the board are recognising the increasing importance of screening potential employees, our findings also show that a significant proportion of organisations are still yet to fully recognise the potential of employment screening in supporting their wider business goals.”
Click here to download ‘The Changing Face of Background Screening’.
