“Who hired THAT guy?” Social media scandals can create nightmares for your public relations team, but what happens internally when the same behavior affects the workplace both on and offline? Intolerance, sexism, and violence are leading concerns at all levels of the employee lifecycle.

Shaping Better Workplaces Through Social Media Screening

From talent acquisition to diversity and inclusion managers, people management is tasked with finding and nurturing not only the right culture fit but trustworthy contributors to safe and productive workplaces. This means weeding out those who have an active, public history of discrimination. By utilizing better screening practices, you take on an active role in sorting out conduct unbecoming of your company’s policies and values. Further, efficiently leveraging social media data can help accomplish values-based goals without giving up a positive employee experience, and in fact, enhancing it.

Integrating Diversity & Inclusion into the Talent Acquisition Framework

Moving the conversation of diversity and inclusion to the front of the employee lifecycle, can feel like overlapping two very different worlds. On the one hand, acquiring talent is in the business of reviewing who someone was before becoming an employee and inclusion leaders often focus their efforts on the existing employee experience. A climbing trend has been to include the diversity and inclusion conversation at the top of the employee funnel. The challenge most organizations face is how to implement that integration and what tangible measurements both teams can take away. Though talent acquisition focuses on “culture fit” through many avenues, behavioral interviews not being least, background screening is a tool that can deliver that type of intangibility to a data point that two teams can align with to support core company values.

Optimizing Social Media Screening to Measure D&I Initiatives 

It’s no secret that employers are concerned with what their employees post online. Behaviorally, social media bleeds into the workplace easily and the same hostile workplace behaviors that can make work stressful, can also be problematic when that type of behavior is cultivated and circulated by an employee online. In a weight of risk, circumventing both workplace disruption or a publicity nightmare has won out in a battle of whether social media content should be applied in an employment decision. However, this type of online behavior vetting can seem daunting to an organization – What do we look for? Is this legal? How do we make time for this? Or worse – I already know we do this haphazardly, how do I fix it??

A best practice when considering what to do before you get started in the world of social media is finding out what others do and learning more about tested, compliant and results-driven solutions. For businesses that resist (or even openly oppose) diversity and inclusion initiatives, I’ve got some bad news— if you fall behind now, you may never be able to catch up. Faced with pretty staggering evidence that diverse work cultures foster creative problem solving and a friendlier atmosphere, why bring in candidates that will only slow your progress towards more equitable representation? After all, the only thing that tolerance cannot tolerate is intolerance