What discrimination risks are involved when using social media in hiring? Do you think it is beneficial to use social media in hiring? What are your recommendations? (450 WORDS)

Hiring via Social Media Poses Discrimination Risk At many organizations, the people who make hiring decisions conduct an online search of social media to learn more about candidates. The objective is to gain greater insight into people's character and spot red flags that a person might behave unprofessionally. However, some recent research at Carnegie Mellon University suggests that screening candidates with social media contributes to discriminatory hiring decisions. The study was an experiment in which the researchers created fictional rsums and social-media profiles and sent the rsums to U.S. businesses that had advertised job openings. All the rsums listed the same qualifications under different names, but the social media hinted that applicants were either Christian or Muslim or that they were either gay or straight. The companies were more likely to call the applicants with the Christian-sounding profiles than the ones who seemed to be Muslim. Broken down geographically, the difference was statistically significant in some states. The researchers did not find a difference in response rates related to sexual orientation. In practice, the ability to target job-related advertising on social media has made it easy to cross lines that recruiters avoided with ads in mass media such as newspapers and jobs websites. A recent investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times found ads on Facebook targeting users in particular age groups who lived in or visited particular Iocations and expressed particular categories of interests. Selecting for an interest in finance or marketing is fine, but targeting ads to an age group that excludes older workers is a possible violation of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. The investigators also succeeded in a test of purchasing ads on Google and Linkedln targeting workers 40 and under