Social Media In Hiring Decisions

The presence of social media in hiring decisions is something that has become more prevalent with technological advancements. As the usage of social media websites becomes more frequent, the use of these websites in hiring decisions also raises. Issues that arise with social media sites interfering with the hiring process include legality versus ethicality conflicts and discrimination due to specific social identities reflected on profiles of the individual applicants.
Corporations have in the recent decades been cracking down on ethical issues in the workplace, however, there are frequent issues that arise which question the values of the business versus legality of common issues where decision making is involved. One section of everyday

corporate operations is the hiring process. With the rise in the usage of social media sites, what has also risen it the question of whether or not the use of these sites during the hiring process follow the company’s values despite being a legal practice considering that the sites are completely open to the public eye. The issue with this are the judgements that are made. To start the evaluation of this situation, the definitions for the terms ethical and legal must be understood. Ethical involves questions of right and wrong behavior relating to ethics. Legal is defined as following a specific set of rules (Pearce). Both legal and ethical values are accepted in the business world and questions are asked when it comes to decision making following the Social Identity Theory. The Social Identity Theory is a person's sense of self based on a specific group membership. This theory ties into the idea of ethical issues because as managers look into potential employees through their social media accounts, the individual can face discrimination based on their projected social group identities and the social group of the one doing the recruiting. One study conducted by John A. Pearce II strongly reflects the idea of how
membership to a specific social group changes the perception of others from a specific social group. In this study, hiring managers received scores on their levels of empathies on legal and ethical values. The participants were categorized into four groups, “Low Legal/ High Ethical (LL/HE)”, “Low Legal/ Low Ethical (LL/LE)”, “High Legal/ High Ethical (HL/HE)”, and “High Legal/ Low Ethical (HL/LE)”. Individuals who places into the LL/HE group showed to belong to the social identity groups of being having children, married, non-American nationality, and bring strongly influenced by religion and coworkers. People who were categorized as LL/ LE showed to have the characteristics of being influenced by religion as well as being male. With the HL/ HE category, individuals were shown to be typically older, married, have children, have a higher grade point average, higher incomes and tend to be influenced by upper management. Lastly, the employers who were places into the HL/ LE groups where, on average, influenced by peers and had a higher grade point average (Pearce). This shows that the Social Identity Theory affects the employers making the decisions. Due to the employers belonging to a group, this results in them looking at various situations differently.
Tying into the idea of the Social Identity Theory is the other side of the issue, the job applicants.

If the employer who is recruiting applicants believes in using social media sites when looking into applicants falls into being both legal and ethical in terms of their stance on the issue, this could lead to potential discrimination upon the applicant based upon their specific social identity class. There are risks involved when social media accounts are misused by employers. Some of these potential risks include, borderline invasion of privacy, and the lack of evidence that the information obtained is a fair representation of the individual. Even though the information that is available on the internet is completely open to the public eye, employers can take the use of social media sites too far in some cases. An example of the use of employee social media accounts being misused by the employers is when in the city of Bozeman, Montana required all pending applicants to provide their usernames and passwords to all personal and business related social media sites. This practice was initially defended by the city because they viewed it as just another form of background evaluation for potential employees, however this received a nationwide public backlash and the practice was discontinued by the city (Brown, Vaughn). Victoria R. Brown and E. Daly Vaughn conducted a study that showed the influence on hiring decisions that social media accounts had. Their finding showed

that the hiring
recommendation levels after viewing the men’s social media accounts resulted in little change in the rate that of which they were more or less likely to be recommended for a specific job.

On the other hand, women showed an increase in the rate of which they would be recommended for a job as their social media accounts were examined by employers. This shows that employers used the personal lives of the women applicants while taking into consideration their hiring potential while with the male applicants, the employers did not value to information found on social media sites as much as they did with the female applicants

(Brown,Vaughn).
The usage of social media sites in the hiring process has drastically changed the application review system drastically. Changing the way applicants are perceived based on their membership to a specific social groups due to photos and post on social media sites. The employers of companies must take in to consideration what is ethical according to the company’s mission statement and what is legal in the eyes of the law. Misuse of social media sites during the hiring process can lead to moderate and to high levels of discrimination based on the social standings of the applicant and of the employer.