How to get Powerful Candidate Insights by Combining Reference and Social Media Checks

Pre-employment checks, such as reference checks and background checks, go hand-in-hand in the hiring process. Used separately they can offer valuable information on your candidates. Used together, they can provide powerful insights to help you determine the candidate with the best cultural fit for your organisation.

Why conduct pre-employment checks?

Your employees are your most important asset, and each one plays an essential part in building a healthy workplace culture. Your hiring process needs to be designed to allow you to form a team with aligned values, where every individual contributes positively. This all comes down to hiring the right candidate fit and avoiding bad hires to safeguard and nurture your workplace culture. 

To do this you need the appropriate tools to make confident and informed hiring decisions.

That’s where reference checks and digital footprint checks come in.

Why reference checks?

Reference checks allow you to learn more about your candidates by leveraging the opinions of their previous manager or colleagues.They allow you to verify the candidates’ experience and skills, while giving additional insights into reliability, communication and how they work as part of a team. Reference checks add value to the hiring process by allowing you to learn more about who the candidate is, how they’ll fit into their team and if they’re capable of succeeding in the role. 

Why digital footprint checks?

Not only should your recruitment process be thorough, it needs to adapt to the ever-evolving landscape of the workplace. In today’s digital age, digital footprint checks can assess a candidate’s suitability by informing you of a person’s ideas, opinions and online reputation from the content they publicly share on the Internet.

Sometimes referred to as social media checks (however they go far beyond social media), digital footprint checks can include details related to different indicators such as: 

• Discriminatory behaviour such as racism, sexism, hate speech and homophobia
• Criminal behaviours
• Substance abuse
• Previous unprofessional behaviours such as negative comments about former employers or colleagues, or excessive foul language

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Not only does this pick up any red flags about the candidate’s potential fit, but it allows you to demonstrate your support for diversity, equality and inclusion in the workplace by excluding people that exhibit discriminatory behaviours.

With 1 in 5 candidates showing red flags in their online activity and social media, chances are you're missing vital information by not including digital footprint checks in your hiring process.

How to use them together?

Ensuring a candidate's suitability to the role and to the organisation can be difficult but with the right pre-employment tools your human resources team can be confident in their hiring decisions. Using reference checks and digital footprint checks together can give you the confidence you need to hire candidates with core values that are suitable to your organisation. Having both a third party’s opinion on the candidate and insights into online behaviour are a powerful combination to allow you to hire the right person, and avoid the costs associated with a bad hire.

With the Xref and CheckSocial integration, you can automate the digital footprint process at the same time as conducting your reference checks ahead of making an offer to your preferred candidate.