Hiring a new employee can be stressful. Will the person be the right fit for our workplace? Do they have the right skills? In order to alleviate this stress it is critical to learn as much as we can about that person before making them an offer of employment. For many of us the Internet has become another arrow in our quiver in order to gain more information that will allow us to make a fully informed decision prior to making a job offer. Googling a candidate, checking their profile on Linked In or some other social networking website such as Facebook has become commonplace. According to Reuters one in five hiring managers say they use social networking sites to research job candidates. While a third of them dismissed the candidate after what they discovered, 24 percent of these managers said they found content to help them solidify their decision to hire the candidate. You may be wondering what is wrong with this practice? On its face, nothing, but dig a little deeper and you’ll see why it is important to exercise some restraint before playing private investigator.

While it’s true some of the information on the Internet may have been placed there by the candidates themselves, consider the following before making a hiring decision based solely on such information:

• You may view information about someone with the same name as your candidate. Without additional ways to identify a person such as a birth date or social security number, you may be making a decision on misinformation.
• How do you know the information posted is factual? Use of Internet-based information that is incomplete or fictitious may lead to infringement of consumer privacy laws exposing an employer to liability issues.
• What if you discover a newspaper article reporting the applicant was arrested? Consider that an arrest does not necessarily mean a conviction, additionally the charges may have been dismissed.
• What if your search turns up personal information about a candidate unrelated to hiring such as gender, race or marital status? Make sure hiring decisions are based only on information that is relevant to the position so it is best not to have such information that has no bearing on the job.
• If you find information that you are concerned about, Christopher Cobey, senior counsel with Littler Mendelson law firm in San Jose, California, thinks employers should bring up significant information from online searches during the interview process and have the applicant address them.

The take away here? Using the Internet as a screening tool should be used sparingly. If used, take special care to ignore personal information and focus only on work related information that is applicable and relevant to the position for which you are recruiting. Consider carefully whether there is a legitimate, and legal reason to discount a candidate based on what they might have posted online.