Wrongful Termination: Facebook Details

A Georgia school teacher was terminated just three weeks into the 2009 school year when one of her students told school officials that the teacher's Facebook page included photos of her consuming alcohol.

Ashley Payne sued the school last week for being forced to resign without due process. Administrators confronted her about the content of her Facebook page. "There's so much focus on this one little thing in my personal life, and nothing on the good things I had done there," said Payne. "I didn't do anything unethical or immoral. I didn't use foul language or act that way in the classroom."

Payne may have the ability to win the suit, but it is advisable that any professional in any field monitor their public profiles, your employers and clients certainly are.

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Social Networks and Your Company

The recent popularity of websites like Myspace and Facebook have offered a whole new way of looking at job applicants and current employees. Many employers actually use these websites as a way of vetting their candidates. Looking at an applicant's profile on Facebook can be more revealing than peering at their resume. But what are the employer's obligations to the employee? Are there any rules about the practice of snooping on public sites to make hiring decisions?

Peopleclick, a recruitment company in Raleigh, NC, understood the confusion facing employers practicing these tactics and released a free eBook, Social Networks and Employment Law. To receive your electronic copy, go here.

“Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter offer an excess of information about job seekers applying for any open requisition in the marketplace today,” said Dr. Lisa Harpe, PhD, Sr. Consultant and Industrial Organizational Psychologist at the Peopleclick Research Institute. “The novelty around these sites overshadows the fact that using these technologies for recruiting and hiring carries with it many legal obligations. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the laws and regulations behind using these sites in the talent acquisition process as employers utilize these networks to consider individuals for employment, verify employment data, evaluate qualifications or use an applicant’s leisure activities as a basis for making hiring decisions. All methods used to make employment decisions are considered selection procedures and subject to anti-discrimination regulations.”

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Social Networking and Employment: Reasons to Beware

If an employers asks in your application you what your ethnicity is, religion or age they face a barrel of troubles. These questions and questions like them are grounds for discrimination lawsuits and are not appropriate to ask, and especially to act upon. No employer has the right to make a hiring decision based on the answers to questions like these.

But these questions and questions like them often do come into play when making hiring decisions. There are laws and protections designed to keep the playing field fair when it comes to job competition, but let's face it, recruiters can't help themselves. Which is why some 40% of employers turn to social networking websites like Facebook and Myspace to aid their "decision-making."

Most important, of those hiring agents that do look at the sites a huge 80% use what they find there to make hiring decisions!

Currently, there is no specific prohibition, law, or protection that says employers can't use social networking to make hiring decisions, but that doesn't mean there aren't dangers to using them.

State and federal discrimination laws do discourage using "too much information." Once you find information out, it is hard to backtrack and erase it from memory. If you discovered a serious and chronic health problem plagued your latest applicant and then denied them the job, they have grounds to questions the reason for the denial. If you can't offer one, expect a discrimination lawsuit on your hands.

Searching an applicants background without authorization is illegal, but if you're searching their Myspace profile, do they need to be made aware? There are currently no laws on the books, but people are taking notice and it's sure to become a hot topic sooner rather than later. FCRA laws do not affect it, but expect to see some action to protect applicants in the near future.

Many states prohibit discrimination against applicants behavior when off-duty.

Some Facebook or Myspace profiles are just for fun and don't really represent the person who owns them. Making judgements based on profiles on which not everything might be true, or information might be skewed is an unfair hiring practice, especially considering applicants are not typically aware they are being looked at.

When making a decision it is important to understand your applicant, but be aware of the dangers of judging their character off their profile on Facebook. The laws are not clear enough to assume you'll be safe doing so.

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MySpace Ejects 90,000 Sex Offenders

Sex offenders have long been known to lurk on social networking sites like MySpace, and recent estimates by the North Carolina Attorney General put the number at about 29,000.

After a subpoena by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, MySpace successfully identified 90,000 sex offenders - a staggering number. They immediately terminated the accounts and have begun implementing procedures to keep the numbers down.

Blumenthal said, “That these convicted, registered sex offenders are creating profiles under their own names unmasks MySpace’s monstrously inadequate countermeasures."

Age verification, restrictions against older users searching for minors on MySpace, an an outright ban on sex offenders registering for accounts in the first place are among the measures being taken to stop predators.

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The New Era of Obama: White House Background Checks Get Deeper

A recently released application to become a member of Obama's cabinet and administration reveals a new concept for the background check procedure at the White House. In the rapidly changing world of the Internet, many businesses (as many as 74%) do a standard Internet search on new candidates, especially those who will be filling an executive position.

Obama's application is 63 pages long. The New York Times has posted a copy at their website. It consists mostly of traditional background information, but there in addition, there are questions that have never been asked before:

"Writings: Please list, and if readily available, provide a copy of each book, article, column or publication (including but not limited to any posts or comments on blogs or other websites) you have authorized individually or with others. Please list all aliases or 'handles' you have used to communicate on the Internet."

The scope of the check is far reaching. Obama is looking specifically for information that might "suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to your family or the President Elect if it were made public..."

It is well known that people in the public eye receive an intense amount of scrutiny and any dirty laundry the media or the competition can find on them will be aired eventually. The Internet poses a specific breed of vulnerability. Every body leaves a trail on the Internet, but the anonymity is often what lures people to be more open and fresh. Obama is attempting the deepest level of character checking by looking at what people do when they feel nobody can see them.

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Background Screens Only Protect You at the Front Door

Pre-employment background screening is an excellent way to determine of the applicant in front of you is the right fit for the position you are offering. You can determine all sorts of facts of their life down to what their credit report looks like and rest assured that you have made a good hiring decision. But really, background screening is only the first line of defense against criminal behavior in the work place. Background screening only detects known criminals, it cannot reveal the intentions of a criminal mind that has yet to reveal itself.

It is imperative for any size company to keep a watchful eye on their employees and on their bottom lines, especially with today's financial woes, one can not be too careful. Running random drug testing programs is an excellent way to ensure the new hires are taking their jobs seriously and aren't trying to dupe the system, as are post- employment criminal background searches that can check up on your what your new employees have been up to - and if they've gotten into any trouble - since you put them on payroll.

But a company can go further, and keep itself ahead of the technology curve by creating tough company policies about legal, ethical, security, and productivity uses of the technology available to their employees. Companies are encouraged to develop policies regarding privacy, appropriate use, intellectual property protection, and they are encouraged to issue statements detailing the practices behind said technologies. The policies and statements should be reviewed once a year, at minimum, to keep up with the every changing plane of technology.

Today, it's almost a given that there needs to be policy regarding email and instant messaging. Less well thought-out arenas for policy include blogs and social networking sites. Both are wildly popular and useful knowledge sharing platforms, however, there are hundreds of blogs about companies with employees, workers and former employees hashing it out in a community centered environment that is prone to leaking confidential information that the company would not want released. As well with information, however inadvertently it may be, that is posted on Myspace.com.

Employers need to realize that with the great leaps forward we have taken, the holes of vulnerability have gotten larger and harder to maintain. One may not be able to stop someone from posting private information, but it would be nice to feel comfortable taking action against that person.

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