Whether you like it or not, what you say or do on social media may very well determine whether you get your next job or not. You might not think that a drunken post from five years ago is important, but your next employer might. And now, Fama Technologies is here to screen you for them.
Also Read: Your Digital Footprint: Online Reputation Breakdown
Companies have been conducting social media screenings of potential employees for several years now, albeit not very thorough ones, so it’s no surprise that there are companies out there offering to help employers get a better picture of the people they are seriously thinking of hiring. People can post offensive things, whether they are seasoned professionals or not, so it’s only natural that companies would want to know whether their employees could get them into trouble at some point, because of what they post.
Fama offers the opportunity to know who it is you are hiring… As Ben Mones, Fama’s CEO and co-founder explains
[quote]Who you are online is very indicative — if not equally indicative — of who you are in the offline world. This is what people are just starting to come to terms with.[/quote]
By analysing content like text, images and video, Fama can find “social media red flags” for their customers. These customers are more interested in whether current online behaviour could cause problems in the workplace, and not whether someone’s recreational drug use while at university.
If you like our stories, there is an easy way to stay updated:
Follow @wersm
Fama only gives customers the data and does not actually recommend whether a company should hire someone or not. Mones explains that they are “providing enough distilled data for hiring managers” to make a better decision, not
[quote] assigning a score to individuals, or drawing conclusions/making claims about whether or not someone should be hired[/quote].
What we are doing is providing enough distilled data to hiring managers so they can make a decision.”
This is also what makes Fama legal, and not open to discrimination suits. At the moment, HR Managers (or anyone really) can either sign up directly to Fama, on their website, or go through CARCO, a company that offers background checks and HR workflows. If you’d like to give Fama a try, just go to fama.io. The first report is free.
And if you are curious, this is how it looks like:
