How Fama’s Online Screening Solution Detects Misconduct at Work

In today’s day and age, workplace misconduct is much more prevalent than most people realize. Scrolling through newspaper headlines, it’s hard to find a day without misconduct-related headlines. When hiring, our 2023 State of Misconduct at Work research reported 10% of candidates had signs of misconduct issues in their online footprint. Now that a September 2024 court ruling has expanded the definition of workplace misconduct to behaviors that occur online, out of the office, and not during work hours, employer liability has increased.

Whether you're hiring your next team member, executive, or brand ambassador, you need a way to truly understand who you're working with. And, you need the right behavioral intelligence solutions to help.

That’s where Fama’s online screening comes in. With our innovative tools, we help you identify and address potential risks—before they become a problem. In this article, we’ll show you how Fama’s platform detects signs of workplace misconduct before you onboard your next new hire, ensuring you can confidently hire the best people.

Let’s dive into how Fama’s compliant Behavior Flags work and how they help you identify signs of misconduct at work.

What Are Behavior Flags?

Fama’s Behavior Flags provide a compliant way to surface signs or instances of misconduct in an individual’s online footprint. Our technology uses a combination of AI, text, and image analysis to screen a candidate's or influencer’s online footprint for specific, job or brand-relevant behaviors that indicate misconduct issues.

The best part? Our solution ensures that you only see information that’s relevant to your hiring process or brand. With Fama, you never have to worry about exposing protected class information or irrelevant details. Our Behavior Flags focus strictly on online content that signal misconduct, protecting your brand, people, and profits.

What Do Our Compliant Behavior Flags Screen For?

Fama’s out-of-the-box solution includes eight Behavior Flags, each tailored to screen for specific types of misconduct that impact workplace culture, safety, and profitability. These include:

• Crime
• Violence
• Threats
• Trolling and online harassment
• Intolerance
• Sex
• Drugs
• And more...

You can also tailor these Behavior Flags to only screen for the specific misconduct types that align with your organization's unique needs, values, and Code of Conduct or even job level or role. Once the Behavior Flags are set and candidates consent, our tool works behind the scenes to screen over 10,000 public online sources for any relevant content. This includes social media profiles, blogs, forums, news articles, and more.

How Do Fama’s Compliant Behavior Flags Work?

Fama uses advanced AI technology that learns and adapts to the specific definitions of misconduct that are most important to our customers. From language nuances to group affiliations, our solution is capable of identifying online behaviors that indicate risks. Our solutions leverage these AI-Powered Behavioral Intelligence capabilities to screen over 10,000 online sources for signs of 8 common types of workplace misconduct.

Examples of How Fama’s Behavior Flags Identify Misconduct

Let’s take a closer look at some examples of how Fama’s solution flags potential risks in online behavior:

• Crime: Fama flags apparent criminal activities—like theft or gang affiliations—while making sure we never expose details about crimes that don’t involve the candidate directly.
• Violence: Our solution detects violent language, images, or endorsements of violent acts, like gun violence or extreme gore. We differentiate between the candidate acting violently or when they simply share articles about violence that don’t involve the candidate, or reference movie scenes or things like anti-violence advocacy.
• Threats: If someone posts threats of physical harm or engages in intimidation, our system flags that content. We can also distinguish between harmful threats and things like mixed martial arts.
• Trolling: We uncover trolling and online harassment by flagging direct intimidation, or content that bullies, intimidates, harasses, ostracizes, shames, name-calls, or insults a person. Our solution knows the difference between trolling and degrading language towards a broader audience or non-human objects.
• Intolerance: Our solutions detects language or imagery that indicates prejudice or discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality, or other protected categories. We also ensure that mainstream political opinions or civil discourse don’t trigger false positives.
• Sex: Fama flags inappropriate sexual content, from explicit images to suggestive language. Our filters know to exclude things like swimwear, underwear, nude statues, and sex education.
• Drugs: Posts promoting drugs or drug use—whether cannabis or illegal substances—are flagged. At the same time, we avoid flagging non-issue content like posts about quitting smoking or discussing detox programs.

Why It Matters: Protecting Your People, Brand, and Profits

Every employee, executive, and influencer is a reflection of your brand. Choosing the wrong person—whether it’s a potential hire with a history of misconduct or an executive who commits costly misconduct and undermines your brand reputation—can have lasting consequences. But, with Fama, you don’t have to rely on intuition or traditional background checks alone.

Interviews, resumes, references, and even traditional background checks can only reveal so much. People can easily put on a façade during an interview, but online behavior over a long period of time is much harder to hide. Fama’s behavioral intelligence gives you real insight into how a candidate or executive behaves in real life—helping you prevent future risks and avoid costly hiring mistakes.

By screening online behavior for workplace misconduct, we help you protect your organization’s culture, brand’s reputation, and your profits—ensuring that you’re always working with people who align with your values.

Start Hiring Smarter Today

Great people make great teams. And great teams build great businesses. Fama’s online screening solution gives you the tools to hire the right people—those who align with your Code of Conduct and contribute to a positive, safe, and productive environment.

Ready to reduce risk, costs, and protect your business? Schedule a demo with Fama today and see how our compliant Behavior Flags can help you identify signs of misconduct and make hiring great people easy.