If you are an employer, you need to understand how important it is in today’s world to check up on your employees. The same holds true for a landlord and his or her tenants. These days, you can’t be too careful with people and you need to make sure they are not involved in anything shady or questionable. One good way to check up on employees and landlords today is to watch their actions on social media.

Since past employers are no longer allowed to give personal opinions on an employee you have hired or are contemplating hiring, you have to find other ways to determine if they are desirable employees to you or not.

ParentMap

According to ParentMap.com, 92% of employers use some type of social media research before hiring a new employee. The website stated that the ones employers trust the most are:

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter

Depending on the source you believe in, some will say that LinkedIn is a more trusted social media site for employee background checkers, perhaps due to it being more of a social network for professionals, while others will say that it is Facebook, a much more widely utilized media.

In a 2009 article on their website, CMSWire.com reported that Harris Interactive had conducted research that determined that 29% of employers were screening potential employees through Facebook while 26% used LinkedIn to do so. Seven percent of them screened potential employees through Twitter.

While there are more information on this in relation to employee screening, research shows that basically the same results hold true for housing providers screening tenants. Landlords have so far made use of social much less than employers, but a number of them does and the number is growing, even encouraged in the industry. Landlords log on to Facebook and Twitter to find out more about applicants and/or decide whether to retain or evict current tenants.

Forbes

An article that appeared on Forbes.com in 2012 said that employers were making the determination about whether or not to hire someone based on the activity on their Facebook pages. The reviewers that conducted this study had a check sheet to follow when looking at a potential employee’s page. The categories they were judging on were:

• extroversion
• agreeableness
• conscientiousness
• neuroticism
• openness to experience

Meanwhile, the Science Daily website stated that employers use the social medium to determine which of their job applicants are desirable and which are not, based on their personal appearance, the attitude they convey through their Facebook profiles and how the employer perceives their lifestyle. The article mentioned that while employers use social media sites to monitor current employees, they use it just as much to screen potential ones. Plenty of fish to check out, indeed. Still, they have to be careful not to overstep their boundaries.

What all of this means for you is that you can get a good sense of the kind of employee and individual will be or already is by monitoring their social networking pages. Now that mum is often the word when you are doing reference checks, social media has very much turned into quite the attractive alternative to your garden-variety background checks.