Is Traditional Employment Candidate Screening Better Than New-School Social Media Screening?

Although we might not recognize the first true social media site as being on par the platforms we’ve come to know, love, and use seemingly every single day in 2018, Six Degrees was the very first social media platform to ever exist. Six Degrees was founded in 1997, dissolved in 2001, and slightly resembled social media platforms we know all too well and use far-too-frequently today. The platform allowed people to create profiles, add others as friends, and even make connections with registered users without having created a profile themselves.

Is Traditional Employment Candidate Screening Better Than New-School Social Media Screening?

Today, Six Degrees is long gone and is nothing but a mirage in the rearview mirror. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and countless other social media sites rule the world; maybe they don’t actually rule the world, though they take up a large chunk of many people’s days. Social media has replaced real-life social interaction to some degree, as a matter of fact.

One thing that sets apart “real life” from interacting with others on social media is that nothing is ever recorded in the real world unless cameras, microphones, or stenographers are present. Conversely, once things are published on the World Wide Web, capturing content sent out to the world’s digital society is possible with a split-second screenshot, ongoing audio recording, and real-time screen capturing using screen-grabbers – or the simple copy-and-paste.

While some exceptions certainly exist – think of social media users being able to control what posts or types of content are published publicly, candidates not choosing to sign up for particular social media platforms because being snooped on is easier on those platforms, and being able to pay various registry websites money to remove their embarrassing or otherwise unwanted content – social media screening generally provides a good idea of what candidates for employment act like in the real world.

Looking to social media is also incredibly easy to carry out. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, and other social media platform users readily log in and out of their pages up to hundreds of times each and every day. As such, employers looking to quickly screen their potential new hires’ footprints on the World Wide Web, they can relatively rapidly do so.

Traditional background checks almost always take days on end to be pushed through; social media “background checks” – checking on social media to see what applicants for positions of employment are like is technically a background check, though not the “background check” most people think of when they see or hear the phrase – are effectively instant. Always remember that employers should never add or follow potential new hires on Facebook, Twitter, or elsewhere across the sphere of modern social media. Doing so can cause applicants to be shocked into making their pages private, effectively making it impossible to reasonably, fairly screen their footprints on the Internet before they clean their backgrounds up. It can also be unprofessional – not everybody wants to “friend” or “follow” their boss on Facebook.

Lastly, trusting businesses like Fama to conduct social media background checks is more reliable than taking on such responsibilities in-house; further, such services don’t cost much money at all, providing customers with great value.