Leverage OSINT and Social Media for Employment Screening
Last week, the much anticipated announcement of Jon Stewart’s replacement for host of “The Daily Show,” quickly turned from excitement to damage control for Comedy Central in less than 24 hours.
Trevor Noah faced some deep criticism from the Internet and social media universe after several older, offensive tweets he wrote referencing overweight women as well as the Jewish and African American communities were found and resurfaced across the web. Although Comedy Central defended the comedian, saying, “Trevor Noah pushes boundaries; he is provocative and spares no one, himself included,” this issue could have been avoided.
Many media specialists have asked how the network could have overlooked this ticking time bomb and potential public relations nightmare. Comedy Central could have easily averted the PR issue if they had known about these tweets in advance and made a preemptive tension-reducing press release.
Saving Your Valuable Time and Reputation
Social media and open-source intelligence (OSINT) data from the Internet can reveal information and prevent potentially embarrassing hires. As a human resources manager, you can know exactly who you’re hiring by looking beyond the standard cover letter and resume. It would be beneficial to carefully examine your job candidates’ social media personae as well. Companies can use social media and OSINT to conduct background checks, confirming a candidate’s qualifications for a position. Monitoring social media profiles can also give you a better picture of the candidate you want to hire and avoid possible public outrages and professional quagmires.
Although anyone can do a Google search, there are some disadvantages to conducting a thorough search on your own. Aside from regulatory compliance, time is a big factor. Even if you work at a small company with less than 10 employees, the competition for jobs remains high, and you could end up with over 100 resumes on your desk. Consider in our example above, Noah wrote over 9,000 tweets since joining Twitter in June 2009.
Using Our Resources to Preserve Yours
At SMI, we believe you should conserve your valuable time. Our technology is cost effective and efficient, saving you time and allowing you to do other higher value tasks. Consistency and accuracy are vital; but not everyone on your team conducts research the same way. It’s easy to overlook data when you have an overwhelming amount of research to perform. Your staff members should be consistent and able to deliver their research results the same way all the time.
No two people conduct research in the same manner and no one can do all the work himself or herself. SMI can help your human resources department prevent controversies by collecting information, archiving data, processing results, generating reports and analyzing findings—all in a cost-effective manner. For example, our SMI hybrid spider is able to pull your candidate’s public Social Media profiles and open web data.
From there, we can search for pictures and posts that might give you a deeper insight about the person you are thinking about hiring. Whatever you are looking for—if it’s going to hurt your company’s reputation—we can find it for you quickly.
SMI’s innovative solutions reduce the time of collecting, organizing and analyzing social media information and data from OSINT sources. We use a blend of an automated software—which incorporates data from traditional search engines, social media sites, the deep web, and even structured databases—as well as a highly trained person to provide our clients with relevant and repeatable results. Now your time and energy can be better focused elsewhere!
See how SMI can make your social media investigations faster and more complete. Sign up for a free demo today.