Sponsored by Fama Technologies
We have likely all had the experience of a bad hire. For some of us, horror stories come to mind. Finding the right candidate isn’t just about ticking boxes for skills and experience. It’s about ensuring that new hires align with your organization’s values and contribute to the broader mission. The impact of a bad hire extends far beyond simple inefficiency. It can cause significant reputational damage, financial loss, and a toxic work environment. A candidate who seems perfect on paper but later turns out to be the source of major misconduct can be catastrophic to an organization. In this article, you’ll learn how modern online candidate screening solutions leveraging AI can prevent these nine to five nightmares. By using data-driven insights and innovative technologies, businesses can turn the hiring process into a strategic advantage, ensuring every new hire is a perfect fit.
Nine to five nightmares
Picture this: You’re a growing business that is finally ready to process payroll in-house. You find someone with all the right experience who knows the technology you want to use and can hit the ground running. Sounds great! But what if you learned after a period of time that your amazing employee was embezzling from your company? Would you still consider that person a great employee? Of course not.
Just because someone can do a job doesn’t mean they will do it in a way that positively impacts the organization.
Research shows that it only takes a small amount of misconduct to make a big impact on an organization. If just one person on a team of 20 commits misconduct, productivity drops by 40% and employees are 54% more likely to leave. Your company may end up being in the news for all the wrong reasons.
Signs of candidate risk online
As of 2024, 50% of the workforce is either Gen Z or Millenial. As a millennial myself, I can confirm that there is one thing we share with Gen Z: we are all digital natives. We have lived rich lives online — as evidenced by the billions of cute pet pictures, kooky dance trends, restaurant check-ins and more. Together these two generations will become 75% of the workforce in less than five years.
We also know that within this sea of online life are signs of risk that matter to employers the world over.
Our 2023 State of Misconduct at Work research proves that there is substantial signal within the broader noise of the public web. Preliminary data gathered for the better part of 2024 shows an even greater amount of misconduct. Over 11% of candidates we screened so far this year have been flagged for intolerance, violence, drug use or other less than ideal behaviors. In these low-probability, high-impact scenarios we found that patterns of behavior were consistent. If someone’s online presence reveals they shared intolerant or threatening content, for example, we found an average of 14 pieces of content with additional signals of misconduct.
Now, let’s examine how these signals of misconduct present themselves online.
Examples of online workplace misconduct
The thought of having your payroll manager embezzling from your organization may sound scary, and it is. But it pales in comparison to some of the other misconduct issues that online candidate screening solution providers find regularly in candidates’ publicly available online content.
What’s even scarier? Many of these misconduct red flags show up online long before they, if at all, would show up on a background check.
Here’s a quick snapshot of the sorts of risk we are flagging for our clients:
- Doctors selling body parts on X: Harvard University was in the news last year when investigators discovered their morgue manager was part of a criminal network selling body parts. Fama also found cases of doctors selling body parts on Twitter, now X. This is part of a growing concern in the medical and afterlife industries. Many morgues and funeral homes now prefer hiring women over men because women employees are less likely to “disrespect corpses.”
- Threats and violence against children: Being annoyed by a screaming child on a plane is one thing. Publicly posting on social media that babies of specific races are “ugly,” that you find enjoyment in seeing or making babies cry, and that you plan to “punch a little girl in her throat” is egregious, especially for executive-level candidates.
- Hit lists and manifestos: In many cases, people leave hints about their plans for violence online. Last year, Fama found a hit list and manifesto posted on social media by a disgruntled worker. We were able to prevent an active shooter situation for one of our customers.
It can be easy to think that this type of nightmare can’t happen to you. Unfortunately I’m here to tell you that these sorts of things happen more often than we like to admit.
Preventing misconduct nightmares and hiring great people requires a new approach — including AI
We are left with some big questions: How can companies prevent hiring people that normalize aberrant behavior? How can we identify these candidates early in the hiring process to focus on finding the candidates that are great fits? It starts with great talent acquisition processes, modern technologies, and data-driven hiring outcomes.
In the past, the tools that talent teams relied on included pre-hire assessments, interviews, background screening, and reference checks. However, people lie on their resumes. They put their best foot forward in interviews. They use ChatGPT or Reddit to game their way through many assessments. And they know exactly which friends to call to pass a reference check with flying colors. Because of this, we’re realizing that these solutions won’t help us effectively find out how the candidate will show up at work day-to-day.
So, what will? Recent surveys show that 3 in 4 hiring managers are closing this gap by using candidates’ publicly available web presence to determine whether a candidate will advance their mission, and to evaluate if there’s a history of inappropriate behavior online. While hiring managers doing their own searches isn’t compliant, top talent teams are turning to newer and real-time sources of candidate information that don’t rely on candidate-driven self-reported data.
Many of the best solutions leverage AI and natural language processing capabilities. AI-powered online candidate screening provides many benefits like automating rote and menial tasks, processing large amounts of data faster than ever, and pinpointing the information hiring teams need to make great decisions.
It helps that AI is being used in recruiting functions. Simply put, it is no longer humanly possible to manually review every data point about a candidate — especially when the online record is involved.
Modern TA technologies make hiring great candidates easy
New TA technologies are available to help talent teams effectively make the transition to getting more realistic, accurate, and frictionless candidate insights. At the top of the list are web presence-based screenings.
These solutions pick up where a traditional background check leaves off and are able to screen for many more sources of misconduct where it’s most likely to occur. With candidate consent, the technology screens thousands of publicly available sources and content specifically for behaviors that the company deems as misconduct in their Employee Code of Conduct. Typically, these include behaviors like bullying, violence, intolerance, fraud, and discrimination. Because signals of misconduct are more likely to be shared or talked about online than in a traditional background check, 85% of hiring managers that look candidates up online chose to pass on candidates based on content they found.
What’s interesting is that these web-based solutions are also changing to keep up with technological advances and market demand. Instead of simply identifying risk, these products can help identify the very best in a person.
The magic of candidate fit
Now let’s talk about the fun stuff: great hires! These are the folks with the right skills to do the job and the right attitude to make a positive impact. They may even be able to fill various gaps that the team has, adding not only skills but perspectives. When hired, these people seem to magically fit in from the moment they join.
Companies can use web presence-based solutions to help determine who may be the better quality and better fit candidate. Online candidate screening solutions can also be used to frictionlessly determine positive personality traits and competencies. These solutions can assist in going from short list to finalist in a data-driven way aligned to a candidate’s core competencies, ensuring thorough and comprehensive candidate evaluations.
They work by evaluating the way people communicate online and reveal deep insights about their personalities, behaviors, competencies, and more. They operate on the data-backed premise that the way people communicate tells a lot about them, their personality, and how they act day-to-day. And these new types of candidate screening solutions can now use natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to take communications — including those shared in online text, images, and even video — and determine a person’s personality traits, workplace competencies, and more.
Time to harness new candidate screening tools
The bottom line is that misconduct scandals are extremely disruptive to the workplace. In addition to the team losing steam and starting to look for other jobs, HR usually is called in to investigate any claims that are made and deal with internal situations caused by the misconduct. Beyond that, PR is typically called in to make any statements, answer any questions from the public, and more. Legal is also usually looped in as part of the conversations.
Needless to say, misconduct scandals impact far more than just the workers involved. They end up creating an exhausting amount of work across the organization, not to mention cost: it’s estimated that each year workplace misconduct costs businesses well over $20 billion.
As more digital natives and tech-dependent people enter the workforce, the importance of someone’s publicly available web presence will continue to grow. It is imperative that companies modernize their processes. With new types of candidate screening technologies that use web presence to evaluate traits, competencies, and propensity for misconduct, companies can avoid the problematic candidates, and focus on the ones with the best fit.
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