In this article, you'll learn about the social media checks that Certn offers. 

Introduction

Certn’s social media checks analyze public content by or about a candidate across their public social media profiles, the news, and the web. Using machine learning, our background check identifies content with potential risk indicators, such as hate speech, insults and bullying, drugs and drug paraphernalia, obscene language, and more. The result? You get more insight into your candidate at a fraction of the time and cost it takes to check manually. You also reduce your risk of facing legal action for bias—a risk that can result from performing social media screenings yourself.

Why should I order a social media check?

Not sure if Certn’s social media checks are right for your needs? Here are a few key ways that this background check can benefit your company:

• Prevent the cost of a bad hire. Replacing a bad hire can cost 30% of their annual salary. For a senior-level role, that’s easily over $50K. Manage costs and protect your workplace culture.
• Protect your brand. Employees’ social media activity can reflect poorly on your brand. Companies with a social media storm or public relations crisis lose customers, revenue, partners, investors, and, most critically, trust.
• Get more insight into candidates. Employees who might engage in workplace violence, such as verbal abuse, threats, racist remarks, hate speech, or sexual harassment, may not have a recorded criminal past in a background check. Our Social Media Check can surface potential risk indicators not captured by other checks.

How do social media checks work? 

To identify potential risk indicators in public content relevant to your candidate, our check’s analysis considers the visual content of images, the text content of written posts, and even text in images, when such text is decipherable by our check. This flexibility allows our check’s analysis to include a wide variety of content types. Examples of images with written content that our check may be able to flag include captioned images (such as memes) and images containing signage.

In order for our social media checks to retrieve posts related to your candidate, Certn collects details about your candidate to help identify them and their social media profiles. To learn more about the details needed to complete this check, refer to Prerequisites for this check.

Who can order this check

You can order social media checks if you are a Certn client and your candidate’s current home address is anywhere in the United States, Canada (excluding Québec), or Australia.

Social media checks can be conducted, with the consent of the candidate, for employment or tenancy purposes.

Prerequisites for this check

To complete a social media check, Certn needs to collect some details about your candidate. When you order this check from Certn’s web application, you typically invite your candidate to complete an application, in which they provide all required details themselves. Some clients also have the option to collect their candidate’s details and consent and submit these on their behalf. The details we collect for this check include the following:

Our check accepts social media handles (public usernames) from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Reddit. Our check can also accept direct links (URLs) to your candidate’s profiles.

Your candidate must consent to this check. If you invite your candidate to complete an application, their consent is collected as part of the application process. If you choose to submit details on behalf of your candidate, you’ll need to collect this consent yourself. Sample consent forms are available for download from our Resources Library.

Stages of this check

There are several ways to order social media checks from Certn, including via our web application, via our API, or via an integration with your applicant tracking software (ATS).

When you use Certn’s web application to invite your candidate to complete our Social Media Check (most common method), the stages of this check are as follows:

How to get started

If you're new to Certn and you want to start ordering this check, start by creating your account.

If you have more questions or need help getting started with this check, contact our Support team.