Human Resources Professionals - Candidate Checker
Those of us in the Human Resources and Recruiting games have to make character assesments of our candidates. But what do we have to go on? Their resumes are crafted to speak to their professional accomplishments and attributes which tells us they’ve the skills to do the job we’re looking to fill however it tells us nothing about them as a person. We conduct phone screening and in person interviews and they’re on their best behavior with the intent to impress us. Many times we can spot the freaks, the crazies and the lazy losers from these screenings; but some of them are really good actors.
Whenever I’m in doubt I try to Google the person to see what they may have posted on the internet. I’ve found numerous candidates, their photo collections, blogs etc. Often these results are harmless and end up being a waste of my time; however there are some cases when they’ve turned out to be a real positive use of time. Like the unnamed candidate who posted a blog entry about using his brothers urine for a drug test or the crime report for a candidate who was arrested for selling drugs in a High School parking lot.
Today I was playing with StumbleIpon which has “Human Resources” as one of my key search categories and I stumbled upon this page, Spokeo/HR. This page allows you to enter a candidates name and search numerous social networking sites for their profiles and information. It searches sites like FaceBook, MySpace, Flickr, LiveJournal, Blogger and many others. I randomly pulled some of the low-level candidates I had in the mix and searched them. Found some pretty interesting pictures, some horrific choices in movies and music as well as some horrible political views; however so far nothing that made me say a candidate can’t work. However in one case I saw way more of a female candidate than I would in an interview.
Originally posted at The WaxNation. Please leave any comments there. Posts on The WaxNation are written by either Kate or Dave Waxman; however livejournal can not display the author details thus to determine its author you must visit the original post.