It's not news that hiring managers and brand managers conduct social media background checks before making their hiring and partnership decision. 

But what exactly goes in when conducting these background checks? What does the process look like? 

What Is a Social Media Background Check?

Social media background checks are like digital screenings that help employers, brands, and businesses review an individual's social media profile and online presence to assess their credibility, behaviour and culture fit. 

Here's what these social media checks mean for employers and brands:

• For employers: They use social media checks to check the candidate's skills and credibility to make sure they align with the company's values. 
• For brands: They verify influencers to assess their credibility, authenticity, engagement and niche to ensure they're the right fit for brand collaborations. 

The goal of these social media background checks is basically to avoid partnerships that can harm the brand's and company's reputation. 

Let's say a fashion brand collaborates with a lifestyle influencer to promote their new clothing line. The goal is to increase sales through this collaboration.

However, the brand fails to conduct social media checks on the influencer's audience demographics and engagement. 

Since the influencer mostly had bot followers and audience demographics misaligned with what the brand wanted to target, it led to poor campaign performance and minimal sales.

Why Are Social Media Background Checks Important?

Social media background checks are the checkpoints for credibility.

You hire a candidate who doesn’t align with your company’s values. Result? Resources wasted. You’ll end up firing them and spend more resources hiring another employee. Or, you partner with a niche influencer to promote your products. They have raving followers. But they have bot followers. If your goal was to make sales through this collaboration, you’ll end up making minimal to no sales. No ROI from the partnership. 

So, how exactly do social media background checks help recruiters and brands?

For Employers & Recruiters

• Assess risks and culture-fit alignment: It helps employers assess a candidate's cultural fit and identify potential risks. 

• Identify red flags in candidates: The candidate’s social media profile and their activity helps the recruiters find potential red flags such as criminal record, negative comments for former employers, offensive remarks, illegal activity and threatening behavior. 
• Make more informed hiring decisions: It helps recruiters understand the candidate's skills, experience and expertise and check if their values align with the company values and culture to know if they're the right fit for the company. 
• Verify information: It helps recruiters and hiring managers cross-check the information provided by the job candidate in the resume with that on their social media profile.

For Brands & Influencer Partnerships

• Influencer authenticity and alignment: It helps brands verify the authenticity and credibility of influencers and understand whether or not they align with the brand's values and messaging and do they have audience demographics relevant to the brand. 

• Engagement and niche assessment: By analyzing an influencer's social media presence, brands can assess the influencer's engagement and niche relevance to identify if the collaboration will be effective. 

How Social Media Background Checks Work?

While it requires employers and brands to create a transparent background screening policy, social media background checks work differently for employees and influencers. 

Here’s how it actually works:

For employees

Step 1: Create a transparent policy on conducting social media background checks

First, define the purpose of your social media check—assessing the candidate's professionalism and culture fit or identifying potential risks to the company's reputation. 

In the policy, also include the platforms that you will review, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram, for instance and the criteria for passing and rejecting the candidate. 

Mention the parameters on which you'll conduct the social media checks. Specify what makes an acceptable and unacceptable behaviour so that the candidates are aware of the elements on which they're being evaluated. 

Here's what is acceptable:

• Candidate's communication skills
• Content and engagements that align with the company's culture and values
• Positive online behaviour

Here's what's unacceptable:

• Discriminatory or offensive remarks
• Negative attitude towards previous employers 
• Sharing confidential information about previous employers
• candidate's criminal record and drug testing

Make sure the policy complies with relevant laws such as EEOC guidelines and privacy regulations like GDPR. 

For instance, your company only conducts social media checks on professional platforms like LinkedIn, Product Hunt and industry-specific forums to get an understanding of the candidate's expertise about the industry and values aligning with the company. 

Step 2: Obtain consent

Now, inform the candidates during the hiring process about the social media and pre employment background checks being conducted.

Then, ask the candidates for written consent to ensure transparency and legal compliance. 

Here's how to ask for written consent: 

"By signing this document, you give [company name] the permission to review your publicly available information on your LinkedIn profile and public forums like Product Hunt and Reddit. The purpose of this review is to verify your professional qualifications, understanding of the industry and cultural alignment with our organization."

Step 3: Conduct the background checks

Create SOPs and keep them handy while conducting the review. Here's the process to follow: 

• Search for the candidate's profile: Use their name and email address to find the right person. 
• Verify work experience and skills: Cross-check the candidate's designation, roles and responsibilities with those mentioned in their resume. 
• Evaluate their behaviour: Read the content they have shared and the kind of discussions they have engaged with.
• Check for red flags: Look for unprofessional behaviour such as negative comments about a previous employer, frequent job-hopping or threatening behaviour.

Step 4: Use AI screening tools to conduct unbiased social media checks 

To avoid bias when conducting social media checks, use social screening tools—they help you scan text and image content, provide historical coverage to analyze content, automate the content review process and offer GARM compliance and custom search. 

💡Pro tip: Use Phyllo’s Social Guard tool, enter the candidate's email address inside tool and you'll uncover their overall social presence. 

For Influencers

Step 1: Create guidelines for influencer partnerships 

First define your brand's core values and messaging pillars that the influencer needs to align with.

Then, set a minimum threshold for engagement rates and audience authenticity. For instance, an engagement rate of 3-6% for micro influencers.

Outline clear disqualification criteria, such as a candidate's history of offensive remarks and controversies.

Step 2: Inform influencers about the social media checks

Be transparent with influencers about social media checks being conducted as part of the partnership process and clearly specify what parts of their online presence will be evaluated. 

Usually, when brands conduct these checks, they look for the influencer's followers, audience demographics, engagement, and content relevance. 

Step 3: Review their profile for niche, authenticity and engagement 

Once you have informed the influencers about the social media check, review their relevant profiles. 

• Past content: Analyze the influencer's previous posts to see what kind of content they post, the posting cadence and the topics they write about. 
• Language and tone: Does the tone of voice and language in the influencer's post use any negative remarks? Does it resonate with your brand's tone of voice? Check the language and tone of voice the influencer has used in their posts. 
• Audience demographics: Analyze the influencer's audience—their age, gender, location and so on to understand whether it aligns with the brand's target audience or not. 
• Engagement rate: Evaluate the influencer's engagement rates to see if they have genuine followers or fake and not followers. 
• Previous partnerships: Review past collaborations to assess how their audience received them and to understand the success of those collaborations. 
• Brand alignment: Does the content the influencer publishes align with your content? Do they have the audience you want to reach through the influencer marketing campaign? Does the influencer align with your brand values? Make sure to look for all these elements to understand the influencer's resonance with your brand. 
• Online behaviour: Does the influencer use negative or hateful remarks for other influencers and brands? Have they been engaged in a controversy before? When partnering with the brand, do they deliver what was promised by them? Analyze the influencer's behaviour on all these parameters. 

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Want to conduct a background screening check for influencers? Use Phyllo. Here's how:

Use Phyllo's Social Screening, enter the candidate's email address inside the tool and you'll uncover their overall social presence.

3 Tips and Best Practices for Conducting Social Media Background Checks

Before you start conducting social media background checks, make note of these 3 tips. They’ll make your background check process much more efficient.

Balance Automation with Human Review

Just because you can use AI-screening tools to speed up the process doesn't mean it will lose the human element needed to review the social profiles. 

• Use AI for social media background screening: With AI, you can uncover the candidate or influencer’s social media presence, understand the difference between a meme and threat and content flagging for specific keywords.
• Implement human checkpoints: Review AI-generated reports to detect biases and inaccuracies. For employers, this could be by scanning the candidate’s profile for skills and culture-fit, and using AI to find and understand their online behaviour. Similarly, you can scan the social media profile of influencers to see the type of content they put out while using AI to audit their followers, content and brand alignment.

Use Publicly Available Information for the Review

Accessing an employee or influencer’s private information can violate laws  and introduce bias based on their personal information such as information like geographical location, race or religion. 

In an article with HRD, Lorenzo Lisi, Partner at Aird and Berlis says:

“In certain jurisdictions, privacy laws explicitly address the need for consent before collecting personal information. In all cases, employers should limit their inquiries to what is reasonably necessary for the job. Collecting irrelevant or excessive information can not only lead to a violation of privacy laws but could also damage the employer's reputation.”

He further adds that the background checks should be relevant to specific requirements of the job. 

For example, when hiring a social media manager, employees can conduct social media checks on the candidate’s online presence, their content quality, social media skills, the results they have achieved, communication skills and culture-fit. 

Unbiased practices

When brands and companies conduct social media checks, it's easy for them to get biased based on the individual’s personal and political beliefs, race or religion. 

Picture this: a fashion brand conducts social media checks on a lifestyle influencer who they want to collaborate with. If the influencer frequently shares content supporting a specific political party, the brand might reject the influencer due to concerns about potential backlash from customers. 

This is a biased decision as it is not directly tied to the collaboration with the influencer. , it focuses on personal beliefs rather than alignment with the brand. 

Few ways to avoid the bias: 

• Use third-party agencies that comply with legal standards like FCRA to ensure unbiased data.
• Focus on job-relevant information to avoid characteristics like age, gender or religion. 

Ship the Background Checks with Speed

Let's be honest: conducting these social background checks are time-consuming. When done manually, it can take days to analyze a single social profile and get it through the checklist created by your team. 

The solution? Leverage social screening tools like Phyllo. 

With Phyllo’s Social Screening tools, you can:

• Scan different content formats when analyzing the profile—it goes beyond text and images. You can even scan audio, video and text caption overlays on the media. 
• Analyze content spanning over years (not just a year or two).
• Automate the content review process using AI—this accelerates the workflow and eliminates the risk of manual errors and biases. 
• Check the content for the theme or topic of your choice—beyond safety categories such as violence, hate speech, nudity or visual attributes. 
• Get a comprehensive report highlighting the problematic content on the individual’s profile. 

Want to see how Phyllo can enable background checks for your next influencer partnership or hiring? Schedule a call with us. 

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