Social Media
Background Checks

What Information Do You Need to Perform a Social Media Background Check?

Performing a social media background check is easy. In fact, you do not need a prospective employee’s social security number or any other information that isn’t publicly available. All you need is  the proper authorization, consent, and disclosure you normally collect for  employment screening,  their name, personal email, and birth date, a name and other key pieces of information.

What If a Prospective Employee Has Made a Social Media Profile Private?

If a prospective employee has made their social media accounts private, it can be impossible to find information. In some cases, you will be able to find small pieces of information on an account that has been set to private, but this varies from one platform to another.

Are There Any Legal Issues Associated With Social Media Screenings?

A compliant social media screening is legal. But the keyword is "compliant."

By compliant, we mean a social media background check that...

• Provides relevant authorizations/disclosures and gets explicit permission from the candidate/employee to conduct the social media screening.
• Focuses only on business-related information and redacts protected class information when presenting results.
• Do not use any hacking, pretexting, scraping, or otherwise illegal or unethical ways to gain access to social accounts.
• It makes a good-faith effort, as dictated by law, to ensure the correct person is being reviewed by using at least 2 matching identifiers, e.g., full name, address, dob, email, employment, education history etc.

Can Social Media Screenings Be Harmful to the Hiring Process?

We find that when conducted internally by hiring managers, a social media background check can expose your company to legal issues such as reviewing and presenting irrelevant protected class information during your research. It's hard to "play "detective" in-house as it leads to wasted hours of unproductivity by your team as they chase information down an endless rabbit hole.  But a quality social media vendor like eKnowID will make sure you see only business-related info; protected class info will be redacted. You get the insights you need to make better hiring decisions while protecting the job candidate's right to privacy.