As social media becomes increasingly embedded in everyday life, many employers are recognising the value of social media checks as part of their pre-employment screening process. Traditional checks such as DBS, employment references, and right to work checks remain essential. However, social media screening can provide additional insights into a candidate’s online behaviour and potential risks that may not be identified elsewhere.
What Is a Social Media Check?
A social media check is a review of publicly available online content to identify behaviours, activities, or associations that may be relevant to a role or organisation. The purpose is not to scrutinise a candidate’s personal opinions or private life. It is to identify potential risks that could impact workplace safety, organisational reputation, confidentiality, or professional conduct.
Depending on the scope of the check, employers may gain visibility of adverse online behaviours. These can include harassment, bullying, discrimination, racism, excessive offensive language, and content that promotes violence, extremism, or illegal activity. Social media checks may also identify potential breaches of confidentiality or other behaviours that could present a risk to the organisation.
What Are Social Media Checks Good For?
Social media checks help organisations make more informed hiring decisions by providing an additional layer of due diligence during recruitment. They can help identify reputational risks, assess professional judgement, and highlight behaviours that may conflict with organisational values or policies.
For example, a business recruiting for a customer-facing role may wish to understand whether a candidate has a history of posting discriminatory or offensive content that could damage the company’s reputation. Similarly, organisations handling sensitive information may want to identify evidence of poor online privacy practices or previous disclosures of confidential information.
Social media screening can also support safer recruitment. By highlighting risks that are not visible through employment references or criminal record checks alone.
Which Industries Can Benefit?
Many sectors can benefit from social media checks, particularly those where trust, safeguarding, or public confidence are important.
In education, the recommended guidance from Keeping Children Safe in Education advises that an online search is carried out as a pre-employment check, to help schools identify online behaviours that may raise concerns when working with children and young people.
Within healthcare and the NHS, social media and adverse media screening can help organisations assess professional conduct and identify content that may undermine patient trust or organisational values.
Production and media organisations may use social media checks to identify potential reputational risks before individuals become publicly associated with a project or brand. Deeper dive checks are also available for those with influencer online profiles to help sift through the large amounts of content for any explicit or adverse behaviours.
For businesses recruiting into customer-facing, leadership, or public-facing roles. Social media checks can help ensure candidates understand the responsibilities that come with representing an organisation online and offline.
Supporting Better Hiring Decisions
Social media checks shouldn’t be used in isolation. However, when combined with other pre-employment screening checks, they can provide valuable context that helps employers assess risk, and make safer recruitment decisions.
While some employers may be tempted to carry out their own online searches. Using a professional social media screening service helps ensure the process is consistent, objective and compliant. Every candidate is assessed against the same criteria using publicly available information. This reduces the risk of unconscious bias and helping employers make fair, evidence-based decisions.
According to Ofcom 89% of adults are using at least one social media platform. Showing that it is more important than ever to include this check as part of a comprehensive background screening programme.
Contact Us
DDC provides a range of screening services designed to help organisations recruit with confidence and consistency. Contact our team to learn more about social media checks and our wider background screening solutions.
