Does Social Media Affect Employment?

All across the country, stories regarding jobs and social media have been popping up quite a bit lately. While being an employer is an exciting job to hold, it can also be very daunting, especially if social media affects your company on a daily basis. Social media has become a hobby for most people these days, which means they use it to discuss their personal lives, their jobs, and their friends.

Let us discuss a couple of scenarios that can affect your company when it comes to social media. The first involves you interviewing a prospective employee. That employee posts information on his or her social media account that discusses their drug use, their nightly partying, or pictures that are inappropriate and bad for your company’s image. The second scenario involves an employee who constantly badmouths the company on their social media account, posts to social media sites while on your dime, and leaves work early often. The third scenario involves you wanting access to the employee’s social media accounts to operate an investigation.

Now this is where things get tough; what are your company’s rights when it comes to dealing with social media?

Some media reports from across the country provide details about companies requiring prospective employees to hand over their social media account names and passwords. Some might see this as an invasion of privacy while others feel it is the best way to get to know an employee. When you think about it, the websites are called social media, not private media. These sites try to get information out to as many friends or followers as possible, making it a very public matter.

Should an employer look through a prospective employee’s social media sites before hiring them, finding information on those sites that they do not like, it is in the best interest of the employer not to hire that person. If an employee complains about his or her job repeatedly, but their production does not suffer, the employer should not get involved.

When you think of it in a different light, should an employee be posting about his or her drug life all over their social media accounts, it might be in the company’s best interest to fire the employee. This kind of information creates a bad media image for the company. Every company in the country has a drug policy for its employees, but not all of them enforce those policies. Some companies decide to enforce them by monitoring social media posts.

Social media has created an elephant in the room when it comes to interviewing prospective employees or disciplining them for social media posts. Companies need to take a long hard look at their hiring practices, especially when they look into an employee’s social media accounts. This could save a lot of time and frustration when dealing with posts made by employees on their social media sites.