Oct 21, 2025

Is This Your Situation: Concerned About Prospective Employees' Social Media

You’re considering offering a position to a candidate, but you may be concerned about what he or she is doing on social media. Is this something to worry about? Read here for the ins and outs of social media background checks.

You have a potential employee, and you're considering a check of his or her social media, thinking this may provide a deeper insight into the candidate's behavior. Contrary to popular belief, a social media check is not performed solely to find negative information about candidates. Instead, social media screening also helps you get a full picture of the applicant.

Why should you even bother? Because in today's online world, a candidate's social media profile often provides a deeper insight into a candidate's behavior. You may be thinking that checking social media lets you see more readily the candidate’s true self — personality, temperament and relatively uninhibited social interactions. And especially if the job applied for is media-related, like a manager of public relations or a social media strategist, the evaluation of the candidate's online presence and knowledge may be invaluable.

To take advantage of these insights, it's essential that you use a qualified background screening company to run social media background checks. Indeed, before you begin, it's important to note that it's a tricky situation. You want all the information legally available from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more, but you don't want step over the line and violate anti-discrimination rules.

Whatever the position you're hiring for, you want to know, without risking discrimination charges, whether your potential or current employees violate the company's standards for online behavior. You want supporting data that accurately predicts the on-the-job performance and retention of new hires. This ensures you will be following the relevant rules regarding accuracy, time frame and other regulations under the Fair Credit Reporting Act when including any information derived from social media. Of course, you realize that you want to stay away from out-of-bounds information like family status, religion, political affiliation or sexual orientation.

You need to understand that only legal and job-related factors should be used to assess or reject a candidate. If an individual has social media set to private, you will agree to see only what is legally available. This could include links, screen names and screenshots.

Using a background screening company to run social media background checks ensures following the rules under the current regulations with accuracy and in a timely manner — the standard lookback period is one year, with report turnarounds of two to three business days. For more information on social media background checks, give us a call. You can sign up with National Crime Search, our trusted partner that can help you screen current and potential employees.

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