Social media upset: New youth PCC forced to resign due to tweets from her terrible teens

Wednesday 10 April 2013

The embarrassing and potentially devastating effects of an uncensored Twitter profile are all too real for Paris Brown (17) as inappropriate tweets from her past have been revealed in the news.

Tweets which have been considered to be racist and homophobic were posted by Miss Brown when she was in her earlier teens. They have now come back to haunt her after she became Britain’s first youth Police and Crime Commissioner. Yesterday Miss Brown was forced to prematurely resign from the position.

This case has demonstrated the dangers of using social media and how comments made in the belief that they are personal, made years ago and have nothing to do with work can have serious repercussions in later life.

But what part is social media playing in the recruitment process?

In a previous guest blog Helen Standing commented on the subject of employers reviewing the social media sites of job seekers as part of their due diligence process when recruiting .

Despite having access to a readily available Twitter feed, neither the Police nor their recruiters checked Miss Brown’s social media profiles before offering her the role as youth PCC.

With most people in the UK having some form of online footprint, more and more employers are referring to social media as part of the recruitment process.  Simply ‘Googling’ a prospective employee’s name is straightforward and can yield a wealth of information about that individual.  Many employers will take the view that if they can find embarrassing information online about a job applicant with such ease, then so can their clients and customers.  As a result, a good CV, a successful application and a strong performance in the interview process could be undermined by inappropriate comments and/or embarrassing or explicit photographs posted on Twitter or Facebook several years previously.

The legalities of checking social medial profiles in the recruitment process

Despite the prevalence of social media in our everyday lives, there is currently no legislation that prohibits employers from investigating or considering information from a prospective employee’s social media profile (however, asking for an employee’s account password in order to access their account is a step too far according to the Information Commissioner’s Office ).

Despite the lack of legislation, employers must exercise a degree of caution when monitoring social media as part of the recruitment process.  In particular, they need to consider the following:

• The Data Protection Act 1998 provides that an employer must make sure employee’s data or information is ‘processed’ in a fair and lawful way. This includes the obtaining and sharing of data.  Employers need to be careful about the extent to which they investigate employees private lives as the information they obtain from social media may carry with it further Data Protection obligations;

• Recruitment decisions based on searching social media could lead to  discrimination claims if a candidate is not hired because of a protected characteristic (such as their sexual orientation or religious beliefs etc) that the employer became aware of as a result of monitoring their social media profile;

• In the event that an employer decides to review the social media sites of prospective employees, authority to carry out such checks should be strictly limited to a small number of trusted staff and the information gathered kept confidential;

• Searches of social media should not be unnecessarily or overly intrusive into the applicant’s private life;

• Monitoring social media as part of the recruitment process should be complementary to the existing application/interview process and not the only form of vetting used; and

• Employers should have in place a comprehensive social media policy to govern the use of social media in the workplace.

Perhaps most importantly there is a word of warning for prospective employees.  Users of social media should review their privacy settings regularly to ensure that what they intend to post privately remains private and is not published in the public domain where a prospective employer can read it with ease.

Ultimately you are responsible for what you post so if in doubt, don’t tweet!