One group of experts recommends, with some precautions, that employers use social media for employment screening, while another group believes that top management should embrace social media as a marketing and branding strategy. Read on to see what they have to say on this very current topic.

Latest screening trend? Social media. According to TalentWise, which offers U. S. and Canadian employers background checks, onboarding, testing, and other hiring solutions, social media are now so widely used—and so cheap—that employers would be remiss in failing to take advantage of them. Bo Hight from TalentWise estimates that in 2011 there were more than 690 million people on Facebook, and, in 2009, 190 million on Twitter, and 85 million on LinkedIn.

If your candidates are using any one of those—and they probably are—you have the chance to take an uncensored peek at their approach to school, work, and life. However, as employment lawyers have advised, there are some challenges inherent in such peeks:

1. You must inform candidates that you will be checking their social media profiles.
2. Avoid violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act by using information you find against the candidate without disclosing your search and its results.
3. Remember that you risk the appearance of discrimination if you reject a candidate, and he or she believes you have done so on the basis of race or religion or another protected characteristic that you found out about online.
4. Especially, keep very detailed information on why you chose not to hire anyone that you researched on social media.
5. Ensure you’ve found the right person on one or more sites, and that the information you review is accurate; remember that personal sites can be hacked into, and false information can be posted.

Also beware of disparate impact. As you may know, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has focused for the last year on employer refusals to hire candidates with felony convictions, poor credit, or no current job. Such refusals, the agency says, have a disparate impact on minority applicants. Most employers, 91 percent, check credit for job applicants who will have financial or fiduciary responsibility, but checks are less common for other jobs.

At least seven states—CA, CT, HI, IL, NJ, OR, and WA—have passed or have pending limits on credit checks. So consider the risks, Hight says, and if you do check credit, make sure it’s job-related and necessary. As for background checks in general, companies that are rated best in class based on long-term retention, Hight says, say the quality of their hires is their number one priority. They all check criminal history, previous employment and education, and references.

One TalentWise client, who also uses an applicant-tracking system from another provider is Felix Martinez, director of talent acquisition for DeVry, Inc., a 16,000-employee global provider of educational services. Martinez was using nine vendors for candidate screening and five for applicant tracking and has reduced that to two. He reports saving lots of paper, fax and e-mail service—as well as reducing costs by 40 percent, since both systems are now coordinated.

He discussed first how a candidate can or should respond if a screen yields adverse information. He or she should be allowed to refuse or dispute the information, he says, remembering the several candidates who did so. But, he notes, none of them was successful.

Can an employer ask a candidate for his or her user name and password for Facebook or another social media site? Two recent court rulings have barred employers from doing so. Finally, Martinez commented on how prospective employers should collect such personal information about candidates as Social Security numbers and dates of birth—online, or by e-mail? Online is much more secure, he feels.

Why should top management embrace social media? Wharton School of business marketing professor Eric Bradlow believes that most people misinterpret the purpose of social media: They see it as a talking vehicle, when, for companies, it can really be a listening vehicle. Bradlow talked his friend Michael Lewis, who is CEO of ILD and Social Strategy1, into writing a book about embracing social media.

Lewis focuses primarily on small companies, which he believes need access to potential customers more than well-known large companies do. Further, he says, social media change rapidly, and smaller companies can be more agile than big ones. Lewis believes the most useful of media are LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Facebook, he noted, was primarily for kids just a few years ago but now offers ways to advertise your business and create brand awareness.

Bradlow notes that customer service may be the best example of a good media use: Think how fast a complaint about your company’s products or services can fly around on social media—and encourage other gripes. By using the same media, you can counter such negative publicity. And, you can do it much more quickly than in the old days of snail mail. Lewis’s book is Social Media Leadership: How to Get off the Bench and into the Game.