While social media has clear value in recruiting applicants for federal job vacancies, MSPB has said, in the candidate assessment phase of the process hiring managers need to carefully consider its limits. These include:
Reliability. “A candidate may claim deep knowledge, far-reaching networks, and towering achievements” in an online profile but they need to be verified in other ways. Conversely, some people are victims of online harassment that smears or misrepresents them.
Job-relatedness. Online profiles often contain personal information that may not be formally considered in a hiring decision and that “add nothing positive to a hiring decision”—but “may subtly bias the evaluation of job-related qualifications.” Having such knowledge “may raise uncomfortable questions about a manager’s motives or objectivity” in a challenge to a hiring decision.
Fairness and access. Since not all persons use social media equally—and some not at all or essentially not at all—relying on it as an assessment tool can “unintentionally tilt the playing field, contrary to an agency’s obligation to conduct fair and open competition so that all applicants receive equal opportunity.”
Said MSPB, “The day may yet come when it can routinely and robustly aid in evaluating applicants’ qualifications. For now, though, hiring managers would be wise to treat social media as a recruitment tool, rather than an assessment tool, and to be wary of using social media to conduct freelance research on applicants.”
