Employers need to understand the basics of employment law discrimination to ensure that their hiring practices are compliant. When you embrace technology and start social media assessments on your potential candidates, you need standards in place to avoid any seeming discrimination.
Establish clear procedures to ensure reasonable hiring decisions.
Write a social media policy
Before you employ the use of social media content in your hiring decisions, establish a policy that details what information you will use, how you will use it and who is responsible for those investigations. Determine a point in the hiring process when you will conduct this social media assessment and stick with it for every potential candidate. Ensure that you apply the policy consistently with every candidate.
Inform every candidate of the intent to use social media information
Protect your company from any implication of discrimination for your social media assessments by informing every prospective candidate of your intention, including the information about when you will access the information and how you will evaluate it.
Avoid using any prohibited information
Remember that hiring decisions cannot consider any gender, age or sexual preference information. You must also ignore any marital status information and religious posts when assessing social media profiles. Any use of this type of information could be discrimination.
Protect your hiring practices and your potential candidates by establishing reasonable procedures for candidate vetting. Follow your procedures consistently and protect your business from discriminatory implications by isolating only that information which is not protected by law.