Question

My son plays basketball for a small private college in Iowa. During the recruiting process, the college coaches face an information asymmetry problem -- they can observe a recruit's playing skills by watching games and practice sessions, but they cannot gather full information about other personal characteristics that are important in college athletics (e.g., academic ability, work ethic and emotional maturity). For this reason, the college coaches use a variety of sources to learn about the recruits, including social media posts. Accordingly, the recruits are advised to be careful about what they post on social media. Many employers also use social media to learn about job candidates due to information asymmetry problems. Is this practice fair? Should employers use this sort of personal information to make decisions about potential work performance?

Answer 1

The employers or recruiters use social media channels to understand better the candidates whom they are going to interview and hire. Social media channels help recruiters to validate various assumptions formed during hiring process. They can verify the background of recruit's in a more easy way.

* How far it is good to use social media for recruitment purpose ? This question is still up for discussion. It may be a problem for a candidate because in social media they have personal information which they don't prefer to share with a person whom they don't know well.

* In order to check the background of a candidate, company needs to depend on social media channels. All recruiters want to verify their candidate before hiring. For this they follow various sources like social media channels, or may ask for references whom they can call and inquire about the prospective employee. In my opinion, there is nothing wrong in it to use a person's personal information to know more about that person before hiring. When a candidate is applying for a job, he should have no doubt that employers will not use his personal information. Better he should be prepared for what the recruiter will ask after viewing his personal and professional profile. Generally, recruiters follow the Facebook for personal details and LinkedIn for professional details. To avoid any type of biases recruiters just search candidates information from various social networking sites.

However, there are some people who don't share much information on social network channels, in that case the interviewer has to follow other sources like references or information from some known people in their own network. But it is always good to share as much as information about *yourself so that a recruiter can judge you well. There is a limit between personal and professional life and every recruiter knows it well. So they will give importance to those aspects of your life which is highly required in professional life.

*If you are not a suitable candidate for their position then they don't have anything to do with your personal profile.

*The social media is not the only source of reference for judging a candidate, there are also other sources. So employers can use this sort of personal information from various social media along with other sources to make decisions about potential work performance. Work potential of an employee can only be known from the previous employer of the prospective employee, from the information posted in LinkedIn and from the references provided by the prospective employee, whereas the personal information can be known from Facebook and asking the candidate behavioral questions and explaining situations where they can be judged by their reactions.