Social Media Platforms 101: LinkedIn

One of the first things people ask during PRISM training sessions is “how does that social media site help me accomplish [my goal]?” Often, we spend more time during our training sessions covering the usefulness of social media sites rather than talking about how to use the tool itself. We decided it was time to launch a little series called Social Media Platforms 101. It is designed to help our readers understand the basic construct of the platform itself, the information you can gather from different social media platforms, and how that information can be used.

As we’ve been focusing on employment issues recently, we thought it was pertinent to begin with LinkedIn.

What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a professional networking site. It allows users to create profiles that showcase their current and past work experience, educational background, and skills that they may have. Users can also connect with individuals and join groups based upon their industries, interests, and affiliations. This allows LinkedIn members to network with one another to find new business and job opportunities. Currently, the main users of LinkedIn are professionals looking for new job opportunities, employers and recruiters looking to hire new talent, and managers and executives searching for new business ventures and partners.

One important thing to note about LinkedIn is that privacy settings can be very stringent. While many people leave their profiles open to attract more traffic, it can be difficult to glean information from a profile without being connected to the individual. However, you can still often access information by being connected to a user who is connected to the individual of interest.

What Can You Learn From LinkedIn?

In order to demonstrate how you can pull information off of LinkedIn, our Legal Counsel, Blake Haase, volunteered his LinkedIn profile.

 



When you look at Mr. Haase’s page, you can see a brief overview of his work experience and the number of connections he has made on LinkedIn. If you scroll down a little further you will notice he has listed out some of his job duties and a few projects he has worked on during his professional career. In addition, you will find information about the degrees he earned, his listed skills, and the groups he belongs to. Cumulatively, this page paints a basic profile of Mr. Haase’s job experience and qualifications.

In addition, if you are logged in to an account and are connected to the individual, you can access a connection chart that will show your commonalities with the person of interest.

 

How Can You Use Information Found on LinkedIn?

 

The major use of LinkedIn is obviously employment related. Whether you are an employer vetting out applicants or a firm conducting background checks on behalf of another organization, LinkedIn’s strongest usage is in constructing educational and professional profiles. This information can be used to corroborate or find inconsistencies in information provided by prospective employees on resumes and applications, and it can provide additional information about the individual’s past history that was omitted from their resume. However, it can also be used for basic investigative purposes: constructing timelines, building connections, learning interests and skills, and gaining more general insight into your person of interest.

 

Conclusion

 

Not all social media sites are created equally. Each one has its own unique set of data and serves a different set of purposes. As technology evolves, the usage of and the information found on each site will evolve along with it. It is up to us as investigators and analysts to keep abreast of these trends and provide the best services possible.

Cut Bad Hire Costs Using Employee Vetting

Hiring a new member of any team is no easy task. Every company sinks thousands of dollars into each new employee via hiring costs, wages, and training. However, not every employee ends up being the right fit for the job, resulting in a bad hire. According to a December 2012 CareerBuilder survey, these bad hires can cause the company many different issues ranging from poor work quality to workplace turmoil to customer dissatisfaction. Ensuring the individual is a right fit for the organization before bringing them in is essential to prevent both bad hiring costs and hires’ remorse.

Recently, we began writing pieces about employee vetting processes. First we wrote about The Importance of Employee Vetting from a security and image perspective. Then we wrote about The Importance Social Media Policies in the entire employment process from background checks to continuous evaluation. Now we’re going to tackle the issue of cutting your number of bad hires by enhancing your hiring process.

Calculating the Cost of a Bad Hire

To get a basic idea of how much a bad hire can financially cost your company, you can use ADP’s Bad Hire Calculator. Considering the data sources used to compile this tool are approximately 10 years old, the costs of bad hires have likely risen since the formula was created. However, these direct financial costs connected to the hiring process are not the only costs companies pay when they make a bad hire.

One major downside to a bad hire is the negative impact it has on the organization as a whole. Managers report that bad hires ultimately bring a negative influence to the business, cause a decrease in employee morale, and waste managers’ time with unnecessary supervision. When bad hires are let go, it also leaves vacancies in the company which burden the current staff with an extra workload and potentially result in lost opportunities during the replacement hiring cycle.

The Bad Hire Solution: Enhanced Background Checks

When you consider that the costs of a bad hire are in the thousands of dollars, running additional pre-employment screening methods on advanced rounds of candidates is a wise investment. Many employers report they are rushing to hire candidates and lack the intelligence crucial to making wise hiring decisions. You can improve your company’s hiring process by gaining the intelligence you need by creating a comprehensive employee screening solution for your final candidates that will capture the intangibles necessary for the position. There are two main solutions you should consider when enhancing your pre-screening process:

Resume & Application Vetting – With the current state of the economy, employers report that resume fraud is a persistent issue. In order to ensure your candidate was truthful in their resume and on their application, you can vet applications and resumes using a variety of techniques spanning from reference calls to online investigations. Social media sites like LinkedIn can assist with confirming the timeline individuals present on their resume, and you can build networks of coworkers and classmates to demonstrate personal connections to institutions. Finding inconsistencies on resumes can help reduce the amount of candidates in the final rounds of the hiring process and provide crucial intelligence to making the right decision.

Incorporating Social Media Data – It can provide a wealth of information about a candidate’s personality, allowing you to access a rich set of personal information not contained on resumes or applications. Social media can provide you with an inside glimpse into the lives of individuals ranging from their technical ability to their general demeanor and outside interests. It can also give you valuable data about how individuals interact with others and handle adversity and conflict. This data can be crucial to ensuring you hire someone whose personality will mesh with your current staff and can assist with intelligence for your final round of interviews.

While additional screening methods do bring additional costs, if you only run these methods on serious candidates rather than rushing to a decision, you can actually save your company thousands of dollars in bad hiring costs.

The Importance of Social Media Policies

Two days ago, a member of the team was browsing their Facebook feed and found a video of an acquaintance. This individual worked at a local restaurant, and the footage showed the individual and other members of the staff partying in the kitchen of the restaurant after hours. During the course of the video, employees were smoking marijuana, drinking alcohol, and dancing to loud music. Within a few hours, the individual had removed the post and posted a status update lamenting about being pressured to remove the post.

If left unchecked, situations like these can lead to bad publicity for organizations and can even damage the company’s reputation. Two weeks ago, we wrote about The Importance of Employee Vetting and Continuous Evaluation. Not every organization has access to the same resources of a giant corporation to deal with the fallout of social media debacles. However, a strong social media policy is a massive step in the right direction. In order to have a robust policy, there are a few main things organizations need to do along the employee timeline.

Add Social Media to Your Background Check Procedures

Presently, many companies are adopting social media pre-employment screening as a part of their comprehensive background check process. This allows organizations to assess certain character traits vital to their organization and authenticate some resume and application-based data by using open source information on social media sites. It also helps assure due diligence on the part of employers during the hiring process. However, it is pertinent to fully disclose the scope of the background check process on authorization forms. The Society for Human Resource Management has posted a good example of a standard authorization form which may cover the scope of a comprehensive background check. It is important that companies routinely update these forms and their hiring procedures to remain Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) compliant.

Make a Sound Social Media Policy

In addition to incorporating social media to background check procedures, companies need to have a robust social media policy in place. Social media policies and monitoring procedures can help employers ensure that employees understand and acknowledge the full scope of workplace monitoring and that employers apply the policy equally using standardized procedures. This policy can cover a multitude of areas, including acceptable employee use, business use, and investigative procedures. While businesses need to respect employees’ right to organize, there is still a lot of leeway given to companies to create and enforce acceptable use policies. Attorney Heidi Carpenter wrote a great set of guidelines employers should use when utilizing social media in the workplace.

Follow Through

One major issue that arises is employers’ laxity regarding policies and procedures. Employers need to reinforce the policies by integrating them into the larger company culture. In order to ensure compliance with company regulations, businesses also need to routinely monitor their employees’ social media profiles and enforce the policies in a nondiscriminatory manner. In doing so, companies can help protect their reputation by hiring the right person and preventing situations from getting out of hand.

Disclaimer: This blog post is for informational purposes and should not be construed as giving legal advice. For legal advice regarding social media policies and procedures, consult a legal professional.

The Importance of Employee Vetting and Continuous Evaluation

In the past few months, employee vetting has been at the center of the debates regarding two major public relations nightmares.

One is the case of Edward Snowden, the Booze Allen employee who exposed the NSA’s PRISM program. Some have claimed Snowden provided false information on his resume yet somehow still successfully passed his background check. Gaining access to the information available in this position is what both prompted Edward Snowden to apply for the position and allowed him to expose the government’s dealings in dark data. In response, legislators are attempting to overhaul the background check and security clearance process.

The other is the current murder investigation focusing on former New England Patriot Aaron Hernandez. When Hernandez played at the University of Florida, he began displaying a propensity for violence and even took a photo of himself with a glock. Over the past few years, Hernandez has been connected to many violent encounters which have ultimately been publicized in light of the current investigation. In response to the investigation, the New England Patriots released Hernandez and lost approximately $250,000 on a jersey swap program that allowed fans to swap out their Hernandez jerseys for another player’s. It also spurred EA to remove Hernandez from two upcoming game releases.

In both cases, officials and commentators often cite the failure to properly assess the employee’s background and character prior to employing them as one of the major causes for these incidents. These incidents have brought bad publicity to both organizations which could ultimately prove to be costly and fundamentally damage their reputations. To avoid making this mistake, it is important that organizations embrace a holistic approach to employee vetting that goes beyond standard background check objectives.

Traditional Background Checks Aren’t Enough

Most organizations employ a standardized method of employee vetting. Companies traditionally use premade application forms and a prepackaged public records background checks to complete their evaluation of candidates. However, as we havepreviously covered, public records data can often be inaccurate or out of date. Similarly, these premade application forms may no longer capture the information vital to the needs of an organization. Standardized methods do not provide a comprehensive means of evaluation, especially for visible and sensitive positions which require a deeper dive into the daily lives of individuals.

Recently, our analysts worked two cases which clearly demonstrate this point. We were asked by a client to investigate two individuals who were hired for security-based positions. These positions required individuals to have a clean criminal record, be drug free, and refrain from having connections to potentially harmful influences, such as gangs. Both of these employees indicated refraining from substance abuse in their applications, passed their drug tests, and showed no history of legal troubles in their public records searches. However, their social media footprints revealed a much different story. One individual had a history of posting stashes of drugs and money on his social media accounts as well as discussing his marijuana smoking habits. The other had a brother who was affiliated with a local gang; his brother posted photos of himself both smoking marijuana and standing in a field of marijuana. These social media investigations revealed that both employees posed potential security threats.

Continuous Evaluation is Necessary

Once employees are on the job, organizations cannot afford to go without continuous evaluation. The circumstances in employees’ lives can change. New financial hardships may arise which make them more susceptible to bribery. Individuals can make new connections to individuals and organizations which put them at risk. People can get into legal trouble during the course of employment. No matter what new circumstances may arise, periodic reinvestigations, similar to those done for security clearances, are necessary to ensure compliance with company regulations and policies. These evaluations can help head off any potential incidents before they manifest themselves.

The Value Added

When organizations conduct tailored, thorough employee vetting investigations and continuous evaluation, they can ensure they are doing their due diligence. This can help them control their image by finding obvious sources of data which exist in social media. Social media data can identify red flags during the pre-screening process which can help organizations avoid marring their reputations by curtailing public relations debacles. In a world in which inordinate amounts of information are available to the public, it is important for employers to ensure they access the intelligence vital to mitigating organizational risk.