Hiring decisions and social media

While more than 13,000 Human Resources professionals from around the world are waking up in the Las Vegas Convention Center this morning, Historic City News has learned that one Santa Barbara company is pitching an idea today which can have a profound effect on us here in St. Johns County.

In St. Johns County, the jobless rate for March was 8.6 percent, the lowest in Northeast Florida. In February, the rate was 9.2 percent and in March 2010 the rate was 9.5 percent.

As more of the potential workforce is actually “on-the-job”, employers, who are trying to decide which applicants to interview, can afford to “pick and choose”. And, they can be very selective when deciding which employees to keep, and which to let go, in a shrinking economy.

Social media like twitter, myspace and facebook, are becoming great, economical ways for recruiters to announce job openings and find qualified candidates. The conversational nature of social media allows you to interact with potential applicants and learn more about their professional backgrounds, experiences, and goals.

As more area businesses and government agencies are looking for ways to cut cost without cutting effectiveness, the use of electronic classifieds like craigslist and Internet based job search sites like monster.com are becoming popular alternatives to “help wanted” ads in printed newspapers.

That being said, it also opens the door to learning a lot about applicants that you might not discover during a traditional interview. California software gurus at Social Intelligence Corp., are banking on their ability to sell their process of “super-googling” the names of employees and job applicants during the 2011 Society for Human Resource Management annual conference and exposition after they won a favorable decision from the Federal Trade Commission on the idea earlier this month.

Their pitch? Statistics promoted in their literature; including a claim that forty-one percent of employees admit to personal Web surfing at work for more than three hours a week and that employees check personal e-mail up to five times a day.

If what Social Intelligence Corp., has reported is accurate, employers should be concerned that use of the Web for personal reasons, while giving the appearance of working, results in as much as a 40% loss in worker productivity. They also point out that sixty percent of all on-line purchases are made during work hours.

Which begs the question: If a candidate applies for a job, and, you don’t know a lot about them, should you do a little detective work via social media?

Social Intelligence Corp., hopes you will say, “yes”. And, last week, they were given the legal “thumbs up” to archive seven years’ worth of your facebook posts. These archives will be used by Social Intelligence Corp. as part of their background checking service for job applicants.

Concerns were expressed in the review process that the notion of looking into someone’s personal life when evaluating their prospects in a business relationship would be the end of the world. Such investigations are nothing new; private detectives have made their living snooping into people’s personal business since before Abraham Lincoln hired Allan Pinkerton.

Investigative Consumer Reports were defined in the earliest version of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Additional restrictions, including the requirement that potentially adverse information be re-investigated before being reported if the report is being used for employment purposes, have been the standard for many years.

The difference for St. Augustine and St. Johns County residents who regularly “expose” their spontaneous feelings and reactions on twitter, or chronicle their deepest, darkest secrets on facebook, or offer their wildest, hottest candid photographs on myspace, is that those “precious memories” may come back to haunt them.

In the immortal words of Ricky Ricardo, “Lucy … you got some splainin’ to do!”