Never in my experience (as a software developer) but that might just be Canada
I’ve not recalled an instance where employers go through your social media. First, it’s none of their business and second, they don’t even know where to look because I haven’t shared or told them. What they should be concerned with is whether I’ve committed any crimes or if I have anything that jumps out at them that makes them consider or not consider me. Social Media should never be a determinable factor.
I have had job applications ask for social media profiles as part of the application process. —_—
Usually a good red flag for the working conditions.
Ha! When I got hired at this job, the people in my department literally said “we couldn’t find you on Facebook” and I just laughed because I didn’t have an account on there, still don’t, will not.
So you may not want it to be a factor, that doesn’t mean it isn’t.
As someone in a salaried tech job, I’ve only had one require drug tests: an investment management company. They said it was an SEC requirement
I’ve never had a company ask about my social media accounts. I m sure there’s some sort of background check but I have no way of knowing
Depends on the job/industry. For instance, I’m in the US.
For IT. Neither of those have come up. But a lot of my jobs have been references by friends or people I’ve worked with.
For driving commercially, drug tests are required for your license. And companies are required by law to do so many tests a quarter.
I’ve only ever had to pass a drug test for low paying hourly jobs. I’ve never been tested for a salaried position.
If you work in certain fields of engineering then you have to pass a drug test. The only job I have had where I wasn’t drug tested was my hourly IT job before getting my degree. I have never had to give out social information and I never would.
That’s interesting to hear. I started out as a web dev and made quite a few transitions until I got the title software engineer, bounced around a few companies until I settled at my current job and since I got that first salary job have never been asked. I even did a short stint of security work a company that had a decent amount of government contracts when I was desperate.
I honestly didn’t think they were still a thing outside of maybe directly in government positions.
I’ve been through about 8 tech jobs in my nearing twenty years of experience. The only drug test I ever had was when I worked at a tech company for a hospital, and I declined.
Even the gov job did not require a drug test. Maybe because it wasn’t federal government, or there was some loophole with contractors, or something else. I definitely had friends who had to do drug tests with government contracts.
I typically laugh at drug tests. I live in a legal state, I don’t use anything, and the fact that you can take cocaine every day for a year and stop for a few days, and you’ll still pass. It’s stupid and I’m fortunate to be in a position where it’s an extremely rare question to ask in my industry.
Entirely depends on the employer.
Yeah, why would there be a standard procedure? Being jerked around is a key feature of job hunting. Helps make sure you are at the appropriate groveling level.
Depends. If you’re looking to work somewhere that has a public image, social media is likely to be a factor. Anything involving safety or serious liability will need drug screenings. Outside of that, it depends on how much the company is willing to pay for screenings. They have to pay for them for candidates, and they’re not cheap. I’ve done work in background check software and can tell you costs range from the low hundreds to sometimes over a thousand bucks per candidate, particularly if a candidate has gone by a lot of names and lived in a lot of places. You end up with a big combinatorial of identities to do criminal records requests for from different jurisdictions across the country. Some jurisdictions require a phone call to request records, and I can think of at least one where someone has to literally go pick up documents from a courthouse in person. On top of that, some drug panels are quite expensive. Social media review usually takes a lot of a real person’s time to go through; hard to automate if you want to be thorough beyond just pointing at a Facebook profile to scrape and feed through an LLM, and some kinds of posts are relevant to some employers vs others.
If you’re concerned, 7 years is the industry norm for how far back they consider your past unless it’s for like a professional certification or degree.
In IT, I always have to complete a background check and a drug screening whenever I start a new job. I’ve never heard of an employer reviewing someone’s social media before, but I guess it could happen. This account is a bit of an outlier, and my social media usually centers on tech stuff.
They review it during the initial interview. They just don’t tell you.
In gov jobs, they want you to share it, under the guise of avoiding phishing attempts.
What gov job were you working which asked you to provide your social media details? I’m in the midst of a batch of interviews for a variety of gov positions, and I’ve not been asked to provide social media information once. It’s not on any of the forms I’ve filled out, and it’s not come up in any of my interviews.
Even when I held a security clearance and worked positions which required that, I don’t recall my social media coming up at all during the hiring process.
Not saying it doesn’t occur “unofficially” as a further vetting criteria, but I don’t see what you mean by saying government jobs try to get you to volunteer that info to prevent phishing.
I still don’t believe this. I’ve been part of the interview process at several different companies, and no one ever talked about social media. Maybe it’s not a thing in IT?
I’ve been drug tested for every “real” job I’ve had outside of food/retail, but only as a pre-employment formality, even when working for a company in a legal state. I’ve passed it through abstention, a niacin flush, and even just using synthetic.
Can’t tell you about social media, cuz I don’t have any associated with my name other than my lunatic profile.
Same here. Only for preemployment and never after hiring. I’ve tried those other methods, and synthetic is the only one that works every time.
That’s wild. I’m the complete opposite.
What industry and what country/part of the country?
I’m curious if it’s a normal thing in the past decade, and they just look at me/my experience and skip all of that.
No.
However, anything that requires security clearance or is PR for the employer will (in the US at least).
If you want a job that needs clearance, I recommend closing your social media now, stopping all drugs now, and wait at least 7 years before applying to those jobs. Limit travel. Work to have any mental health records destroyed (idk if you can actually do this) and cancel therapy. Stop using Lemmy, and don’t do anything that remotely indicates that you associate with divergent cultures (i.e. communism or anarchism).
For PR - just stay off social media and drugs and don’t talk about work except in an extremely positive way.
***> Stop using Lemmy, and don’t do anything that remotely indicates that you associate with divergent cultures (i.e. communism or anarchism).
I didn’t realize that I was a commie for using Lemmy. Just kidding but love the way that you wrote that sentence
I’m certainly not kidding about it. Associating with communism or people who associate with communism is a big NO. And it doesn’t exactly make sense anymore, but that’s the FBI for you
Its even technically illegal to be employed by several state governments if you’re a communist. Or its technically legal, but there’s old laws from the Red Scare era which are no longer officially enforced saying its illegal.
If you want a job that needs clearance, I recommend closing your social media now, stopping all drugs now, and wait at least 7 years before applying to those jobs.
It takes 7 years for all the paperwork to go through, so it isn’t necessary to wait. :P
Closing any social media that might be an issue. Start a fresh social media to randomly sprinkle with bland normal stuff isn’t a terrible idea since not having any social media is apparently also a red flag.
I don’t understand how not having social media is a red flag. I know people look at it funny, but I don’t get why.
People just assume you are hiding something if you aren’t sharing.
People are dumb.
Yeah, that makes sense too.
Obviously this is going to depend on country, locality, industry, and specific company.
I live in the US in an East Coast state. I don’t know anyone who gets drug tested anymore, unless they are working in a sensitive industry (aerospace, as guided by the FAA) or have an accident on the job and are tested after the fact.
There are overlapping state and national laws. My state has legalized marijuana, but the national government, via the FAA, says “No” if I work in certain jobs. I do work in aerospace but not in one of those jobs that the FAA cares about drug testing for.
I always assume my social media will be searched.
good point on weed legalization of federal where it is not vs some states where it is.
If you’re interviewing with someone under 40, the interviewer is going to look you up on social media. Almost definitively, I do not know anyone who doesn’t do a quick google search before the interview. May or may not be anything official at an HR level, and for me personally, unless I see something crazy and you’re in a visible role, I’m probably not going to say anything.
We had a guy once who thought his social media was private and he was very wrong. Their interests were stacked pretty heavily towards weed and guns. Would not be a huge problem if it was private and they were able to abstain long enough to satisfy the potential drug screen, but with the amount of visibility, if anything came up, people might start searching for someone to blame for not doing their due diligence when hiring and my team would probably end up being the scapegoat.
As far as the drug screen specifically, I do not understand the methodology HR uses to determine whether someone needs to be drug screened during on-boarding. Maybe they know something I don’t, but it seems completely random.
tl;dr: Someone will almost definitely go through it and unless it’s actually for real private, you probably aren’t as clever as you think in hiding it. The bar though for social media in my experience is pretty low.
All my social media is private so they wouldn’t be able to look me up, but assume they do if they can. Drug tests are commonplace in my state. The only ones that might not are under the table jobs.
At my work we do check peoples socials very basically, but the people who have everything set to private arent the concern, we like that. We worry about the ones who have to vomit every little bit of their life onto the internet complete with pictures.
We all have to deal with asshole customers but if your posts start winding up on community pages and other users start tagging the company, you’re going to have a bad time. Especially if you violated customer privacy at any point.
Drug tests usually have to be disclosed, so you can check for that. But don’t just ask them straight up if they drug test—that is incredibly suspicious. Instead ask for their policies and/or employee handbook where that will be disclosed. Generally you should try to stay sober while job hunting for several reasons, primarily because some tests can detect residual evidence for months.
Regarding social media, that depends. It’s best to just assume they would and clean up anything that’s public. You should probably do this all the time, but doubly so when job hunting.
Current or past employees (would-be-peers, not managers) are an excellent resource for all kinds of information, including this stuff.
