by Nick Fishman

If you’re sick of having to go to countless websites to keep up with all of your social networking, Spokeo is a great tool. It searches your friends’ blogs and photos across 40 social networks so you don’t have to visit hundreds of websites individually. Great concept for hiring professionals (or anyone) interested in keeping up with your friends.

When Good Concepts Go Wrong

Our inside sources (I’ve always wanted to say that) tell us that Spokeo is getting ready to market this service to employers so that they can aggregate data on their job applicants and employees as part of the background checking process. Good idea? Not if you’re interested in staying out of a court room!

Since many of you have read the cautionary advice we’ve provided about using Social Networking sites in your employment screening practices, I’ll spare you the lengthy diatribe. However, you need only read the Fair Credit Reporting Act, FACT Act and, or the myriad anti-discrimination laws to know that this is most definitely not a good hiring practice.

Spokeo may want to revisit their newest marketing strategy or provide indemnification to employers for any lawsuits that arise by employees and job candidates who were terminated or rejected based on the information they provided.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 9:31 am and is filed under Social Networking Sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.