Employee screening through social networks has its pros and cons. It is definitely a tool that employers are beginning to use a lot more often to check out their potential employees but is it as good as other options is the question.

Some pros of employee screening through social networks are that you get to see the employee as an individual, often times with them not being aware at all. This means you get to see the real them for better or for worse, or at least what they portray themselves to be. This means you can quickly see what a person is like through their profile and take any and all information down you can about them. If you do not like what you see then you can decide to immediately have no further contact with that employee. This is big because the way a person is allowing themselves to be presented in public is probably how they really are. If they allow it to be on their page then they approve of it so it is easy to see an employee's true nature on social networks.

Some cons of employee screening through social networks are that sometimes what you see on a social network is not always what the employee is really like. There may be cases, though rare, where the employee themselves did not create their profile on the social network which means some of the information on the profile may be skewed toward what a friend has assumed about them and not really the truth. In this way you may get false information about the employee and decide not to hire them based off of this information. Another con of employee screening through social networks is that you may get false information that is actually good.

Employees are not stupid they are realizing that more and more employers are using social networks to screen potential employees so they may butter up their profile so that employers think they are good when maybe they really are not. In this way you may not be hiring the person you think you are hiring and it could end up bad in the end. Also employee screening through social networks does give you a lot of information about a person but it leaves a lot out also. Just because a person's personality is shown on a profile does not mean you know everything about them, they may have various felonies on their record that you may wish to know of before you decide to hire them. Screening them through social networks would hide this information and you may end up hiring someone that is a risk to your business which is never a good thing. In the same way screening an employee through social networks may end up in you not hiring someone because you think they have major felonies when they may not, employee screening through social networks, while helpful, sometimes takes a lot of assuming into account which can be unfair to the potential employee if it turns out to be false.