Quality of hire is a challenge and priority for companies today. Despite the extensive hiring process, tech stacks, and billion-dollar investments in hiring, it’s hard not to wonder why it’s still hard to hire great people with ease in 2024. 

However, not all teams are experiencing the same amount of struggles. Traditionally, hiring teams relied on resumes, cover letters, assessments, and interviews to gauge candidate quality. Some have adopted technology for automation. But, automating for efficiency doesn’t always increase effectiveness. For example, pre-hire assessments have been automated to more quickly distribute and grade candidate assessments. But, if the best candidates refuse to take the tests, how effective can they truly be? Similarly, most background checks now automate document requests and retrieval. But, since they haven’t expanded the sources they use to look for misconduct, companies relying on them to assess risk aren’t even addressing the risk! 

Modern talent teams have started to look beyond traditional hiring and pre-employment screening methods to learn more about candidates and improve quality of hire. One of those methods involves looking at a candidate’s web presence for insights about a candidate’s personality, skills and competencies, and patterns of misconduct.

Research shows that 3 in 4 hiring managers are looking candidates up online during the hiring process. And, 85% of them passed on a candidate based on content they have found. While these manual searches aren’t compliant, it’s clear that hiring managers are finding candidates’ web presences as an effective tool to evaluate candidate’s characters, patterns of behavior, and ultimately quality and fit. 

If you’re looking to improve quality of hire, this article is a must-read. We’ll unpack how modern talent teams are evaluating candidate quality from web presence, why it works, and the solutions that make this effective, compliant, and scalable. We’ll start by looking at candidate quality and defining quality of hire. 

Candidate Quality & Quality of Hire 

What makes a candidate a good one or a poor fit has long been up for debate. At Fama, we think about candidate quality holistically. We define quality of hire as the overall value a new employee brings to an organization. It’s not just about hiring someone who is qualified for the job. It’s about hiring someone who can do the job while positively impacting the company's performance, culture, and goals long-term. This is the difference between a qualified candidate and a quality candidate. 

Skill-Based Hiring and Evaluating Candidate Soft Skills When Hiring

Determining which qualified candidates are quality candidates isn’t an easy task. In the past, employers relied on credentials like education as a starting point. Today, many have ditched this as old-school criteria and embrace skills-based hiring instead. 

Skills-based hiring focuses on hiring candidates with desired technical and soft skills rather than other qualifications. This is increasing in adoption as over 70% of companies used skills-based hiring in 2023, up from 56% in 2022. 

A big focus in skills-based hiring is on soft skills. These are psychosocial skills needed for almost all professions, including personality traits and workplace competencies like critical thinking,   problem solving, and digital literacy. 

Personality traits are characteristics that describe behavior, thinking patterns, and emotional reactions. They are stable over time and across different situations. They form the basis of our disposition and are largely inherited or formed at an early age. They influence how we learn skills, knowledge, abilities, and behaviors that directly relate to job success, known as workplace competencies. 

Companies have long-used pre-hire assessments as a reliable predictor of personalities, competencies, and overall job success. Psychological frameworks are so popular because they are validated, widely tested, and reduce bias in the hiring process. The Big Five, for example, has been validated through extensive research across different cultures and populations, captures a broad range of traits, and is widely tested to minimize bias. This makes it a sound and reliable framework for fairer and informed hiring decisions. 

While the framework is good, the delivery method could use some work. Traditionally, candidates are asked to take a psychological assessment and are sent a long, boring questionnaire. Candidates don’t like taking long assessments, and many great candidates drop out of the hiring process when it takes too long. Data shows 71% of candidates will drop out of a long hiring process. 

Luckily, employers now have a way to get similar, if not better, character assessments on candidates simply by using a candidate’s web presence. Learn more about what a web presence is and how modern employers are doing this below. 

What is a Web Presence?

A person’s web presence is a collection of who they are in text, image, and video form. It includes all the online activities and content associated with an individual that is publicly available. This can be found across tens of thousands of online sources, including:

• Social media sites like LinkedIn, X, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram.
• Personal websites including blogs, portfolios, and personal branding sites.
• Online portfolios on GitHub for developers, Behance for designers, or Medium for writers.
• News sources like The Wall Street Journal, industry news, and business journals. 
• Civil Litigation Databases, Court Records, Sanctions, and more

Today, most of the world’s population is on the web and has a web presence. The number of people online is only going to grow as younger generations who grew up with technology in their pockets begin to outpace those who grew up without. Even today, half of the workforce is now either GenZ or millennial. While millennials may faintly remember the sound of dial up, Gen Z and beyond will grow up not even knowing why we say we “hang up” a phone. 

Tech savvy and even tech-dependent generations are spending more time online and creating more content online than ever before. We’re publishing billions of pieces of content each day. And, it’s so much content that 90% of the world’s data has been created in the past two years. 

Now that we understand what a web presence is and how much data there is to find, let’s talk about what a web presence reveals about candidates. 

What Web Presence Reveals About Candidates 

Research shows the way people communicate tells a lot about our character. What, how, and where people communicate can reveal things like who they are, what they care about, and how they interact with others. This extends to what we say publicly online. People’s public social media profiles, posts, and comments provide insights, personality traits, workplace competencies, and patterns of behavior. For example,  publicly posting racial, homophobic, or xenophobic slurs sends a different message than someone sharing about their charity work.

Much of what people say online are things rarely said on a resume or in an interview. For example, most people do not identify as racist or homophobic on their resumes but they will provide credentials and experiences. Interviews tend to focus on career highlights and successes. Candidates do this because it’s the best way to get the job, even if it’s not reflective of all of their everyday behaviors. 

While employers use the information they gather on resumes and in interviews to evaluate how people behave outside of these uniquely professional settings is also an indicator off job success and professionalism. After all, who would tell an interviewer they’ve stolen from a previous employer or share a funny story about getting high at work? It’s rare. But, it’s common to share those stories publicly on the internet for friends and followers to see. This makes a candidate’s public web presence an important source of insights for employers wanting to learn more about how a candidate may behave or represent their organization once hired. A person’s online web presence can also be used to better understand their positive personality traits that can be an indicator of how they may perform or fit into a team. 

Personality Traits 

Our online behavior can be used as a framework for character assessments, including the Big Five framework. Generally considered the gold standard in personality research, the Big 5 looks at:

• Openness to Experience: Shows a willingness to engage with new ideas, experiences, and unconventional values. 
• Conscientiousness: Indicates organization, dependability, and discipline.
• Extraversion: Measures social, outgoing, and energetic natures.
• Agreeableness: Captures altruism, kindness, and cooperation. 
• Neuroticism: Reflects emotional stability and the tendency to experience negative emotions.

The model is effective because it spans across a wide range traits and subtraits that directly correlate to workplace competencies. 

Workplace Competencies

Workplace competencies are job-specific skills that are influenced by personality but can be developed through training and experience. They are tied together generally through a series of sub-traits that make someone more adept to certain skills. As an example, people who are open to new experiences and are creative are generally innovative. Sought-after competencies often include problem-solving, innovation, ability to establish credibility, and more. Because competencies are practical in nature, employers use these to identify and hire, evaluate, and develop employees.

This works by breaking high-level umbrella traits, like those in the Big 5, into sub-traits that are narrow and specific in focus. From there, each trait and sub-trait is reviewed for its influence on business outcomes, and then validated across various verticals and seniority levels. In practice, this looks like: people who are innovative are curious, great at problem-solving, and can adapt to change. Highly innovative people are typically drawn to and succeed in roles across tech, research and development and creative fields. 

Patterns of Misconduct at Work 

Misconduct is behavior that isn’t appropriate for work and negatively impacts the workplace. This spans bullying, intolerance, drugs, illegal activity, violence, threats, fraud, and more. This is a lot more common than many think, and the 2023 State of Misconduct at Work research found misconduct behaviors in 10% of candidates.

While many people use the internet to connect with others, learn, and make the world a better place, it’s unfortunately that people also share dumb or outright hurtful stuff on the web, as well. People post hateful, harassing, and even threatening or violent content online publicly for everyone to see. When shared by employees, these behaviors typically result in HR nightmares and costly PR crises.

Now that we understand how psychological evaluations predict job performance and how people’s web presence can reveal patterns of misconduct, let’s look at how companies are combining the science of psychology with the power of technology to unlock these insights frictionlessly.

Online Candidate Screening Combines the Science of Psychology with the Power of Technology

Online candidate screening solutions combine the science of psychology and the power of technology to help hiring teams better understand how candidates will perform on the job. They are based on “algorithms specialized in natural language processing (NLP) [that] parse and interpret text-based data from sources like social media … or web searches — which allows stakeholders to extract sentiments, topics, or even behavioral cues.” This also extends to images and video, as well. 

Similar algorithms are used to identify indicators of misconduct a candidate may share online. They look for signals of hate speech, violence, illegal activity, and more across text, images, and even videos on TikTok. This comprehensive screening is another layer of character assessments that employers are turning to in order to pick up on any patterns of behavior that would violate the company’s culture, values, and code of conduct. 

Modern TA leaders are embracing this technology to unlock the power of a person’s online presence compliantly, ethically, and frictionlessly when hiring. Now, let’s look at how employers are implementing online candidate screening solutions to make hiring great people easy. 

Why Use Third Party Technology for Web Presence Screenings?

The benefits of reviewing candidates’ web presence make it tempting for hiring teams to keep Googling candidates and friending them on social media. But, like the rest of the hiring process, web presence screenings are regulated. 

Manual searches can open companies up to a lot of risk. In addition to behavioral patterns, a web presence can quickly reveal protected-class information like someone’s race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. The EEOC makes it clear that protected class information can’t be part of the decision-making process, and it can’t be “unseen” once decision-makers see it online. After all, it only takes a Facebook profile picture showing the candidate’s same-sex partner or a photo from a recent pregnancy announcement to lead to bias and discrimination lawsuits. 

Despite manual searches not being compliant, the cost of not doing these screenings is becoming significant for many employers. While in the past, all someone had to do was look at someone’s public LinkedIn profile or Google them to learn a lot about them. That is no longer the case. Implementing an online candidate screening can be the answer. 

Implementing Online Candidate Screening Technology to Improve Quality of Hire 

Implementing online candidate screening requires several compliance, ethical, and hiring considerations. Let’s explore the regulations to be aware of, how solution providers maintain compliance, best practices for implementation, and how to make data-driven decisions from screening results. 

Regulations to Know About Online Screening

All online searches of a candidate are regulated parts of the hiring process. This is why online candidate screening solutions, often implemented earlier in the candidate funnel, work similar to a background check. 

Like background checks, online candidate screening solutions are legislated and regulated by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in the U.S., the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) in Canada, and the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe. State and local jurisdictions can also implement their own regulations, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), New York’s new Social Media Law, and LA’s new regulation for background screeners. 

What makes these solutions compliant (or not) spans several parts of the process. To start, it’s important to ensure the person being screened is actually the candidate. Candidates must consent to screenings. Information can only be obtained through certain ways. Only specific types of information can be considered. There are even time limits for how far back hiring teams are allowed to look! 

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Compliant solution providers understand how to:

1. Find the right person: A minimum of 3 personal identifiers is needed to match candidates to their online content and do not ask for candidates' social profiles, logins, or passwords. 
2. Get consent: Employers screening candidates must get written consent from candidates before screening.
3. Use only public data: Only publicly available data can be screened; private profiles or deleted content can’t be screened. 
4. Focus on job relevance: Only job relevant behaviors can be screened. The best practice is for customers to identify job-relevant behaviors in their Employee Code of Conduct. 
5. Remove protected class information: Removing protected-class information from results, including profile pictures, social media bios, and content or groups related to protected identities, is required for compliance. 
6. Stay consistent: Screenings must be consistent. This means screening all candidates applying for the same job for the same behaviors and the same time frame, known as a “lookback period.”
7. Navigate candidate rights: Candidates have a right to see the results of their screening, dispute any results, and must be notified before any adverse action. 
8. Limit lookback periods: Screening must be limited to reviewing content from the past 7 years.
9. Find public data without accounts or passwords: Employers shouldn’t ask candidates for their social media accounts, logins, or passwords. 

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Beyond sophisticated models that screen behaviors across text, images, and videos, vendors should know how to unlock the deep candidate insights compliantly. 

Best Practices for Evaluating a Candidate's Online Behavior 

Implementing online candidate screening into your hiring process is relatively simple. But, there are a few considerations. First, when in the hiring process does this screening make sense? Second, what are ethical and compliant ways to do this? Here’s where to start: 

• Screen early in the hiring process: The earlier you understand patterns of behavior and misconduct, the better. Catching these early on allows you to spend your time with high-quality candidates. Additionally, knowing skills and competencies at the beginning of the process means more effective and personalized interviews and candidate experiences.
• Be transparent with candidates: Informing candidates that their web presence will be part of the hiring evaluation process is a must. That also extends to any adverse actions, according to the FCRA.
• Ethical Screening: Respecting candidate privacy means only reviewing publicly-available content in the FCRA-approved timeframe. In addition, Ethical AI standards require hiring diverse technology teams, training models on diverse data sets, and relying on human oversight. 
• Findings Should Inform Data-Driven Decisions: Solutions should never make people decisions. What technology should do is give people data so people can make the decisions. Online candidate screening solutions reveal soft skills like traits and competencies as well as patterns of misconduct over time, including the types of misconduct and the amount of it. These data points should be considered when making hiring decisions, not make the decisions. In practice, this might look like understanding that candidates who excel at communication may be great therapists or writers and people who excel technically are more likely than not to make great software engineers, mechanics, and accountants. From a misconduct perspective, it may be worth having a conversation with a candidate who has one misconduct flag from 6 years ago. But, it might be an indicator of poor-fit if someone has a large number of flags for bigotry, sexual harassment, threats, and violence. When one instance of misconduct was found, the person had on average 12 misconduct flags. The amount and recency of misconduct is something worth considering during the hiring process.

Following these guidelines ensures a fair, data-driven, and efficient candidate evaluation process that helps leading talent teams improve hiring outcomes. 

Conclusions 

A candidate's public web presence is an indicator of candidate quality, of job success and culture fit. Companies are adopting online candidate screening solutions to understand patterns of behavior in a scalable, compliant, and unbiased way. For the first time, data can now be used to understand how a candidate may behave once they become an employee and represent the company.

Employers that leverage online candidate screening solutions eliminate candidates with histories of gross misconduct early in the process. They improve the candidate experience for candidates who are both qualified and quality. And, they are saving time and money on hiring – saving millions, if not billions, each year.

For more information on Fama’s online candidate screening solutions and to learn how you can better understand a candidate's public online web presence, request a demo today.

Learn more on evaluating quality of hire from a person’s web presence by watching the webinar with Recruiting Brainfood’s Hung Lee.

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