Cybervetting

(Based on a presentation by Dr. Michael Zickar at the July 2013 IPAC Conference)

Defined as reviewing content found on Social Media or other online sources when screening perspective employees, this is an area where the practice has significantly outpaced the research.  Since it is fairly naïve to categorically tell hiring practitioners not to do it, some researchers are focusing their attention on providing some structure to the practice and determining what kinds of information, if any, can be shown to be valuable predictors of future job performance.

One proposed model of how to organize information found online is to classify it into one of four categories: Professional, Proactive (or “helping” behavior), Deviant, and Irrelevant. For example, previous employment information found on LinkedIn would be considered Professional, posts about fundraising activities the candidate is involved in would be categorized as Proactive, comments about illegal activity or substance abuse would be classified as Deviant, and pictures of kids, opinions about movies, etc. would be deemed Irrelevant (likely the largest category since very little information found online is directly related to job performance).

The cautions of using such information are many. For one, how do you assign meaning to information you glean? For example, if someone writes a lot of product reviews on Amazon, do you infer that the person is exceedingly helpful? Overly critical? Or merely verbose with a lot of time on their hands? Also, how do you account for having a wealth of online data on one candidate and virtually none for another? Can you ascribe meaning to this in-and-of itself? Does the lack of an online presence show prudence and restraint? Is it an indication that someone has something to hide? How do you reconcile that the amount of information you are able to uncover about someone may be due largely to something that could potentially be discriminatory, like belonging to a particular generation, or the uniqueness of someone’s name?

In conclusion, cybervetting is a highly subjective and unstructured process with no data (at this time) to support that the information gleaned has any direct relation to job performance.  Hiring practitioners would be wise to use caution, and to rely on screening measures that have proven predictive validity, like structured interviews, cognitive ability tests, and integrity tests, and other multi-measure assessments.