Predictors of fairness assessment for social media screening in employee selection.

• Author: Balcerak, Alicja

INTRODUCTION

Proper staffing is a key HR task that enables the organization to function. Increasing turbulence in organizations' environments, as well as the increasing importance of employees' knowledge and their ability to interact with people from different backgrounds, requires HR not to overlook any rich sources of information that can be useful to predict how a given person will behave in various situations at work. The emergence of new sources from which information can be obtained to enable such predictions, i.e., containing manifestations of behavior of potential candidates, results in attempts by HR to use this information for staffing purposes. Social media--with their ever-wider groups of people and social interactions--are another such source of information that HR cannot bypass.

According to the latest Digital Global Overview report (Kemp, 2022) there were 27.2 million (70% of the total population) social media users in Poland in January 2022. Between 2021 and 2022, this number increased by 5% (1.3 million). Facebook had 17.65 million users, Instagram had 10.70 million, TikTok had 7.70 million, and LinkedIn had 4.60 million users in Poland in early 2022. This widespread use of social media paves the way for using it for HR purposes, especially for gathering information for employee selection processes.

The use of ICT-based techniques has revolutionized not only business, but also HR operations. In response to the new needs of organizations and the environment in which they operate today, which is turbulent not only economically and technologically but also in terms of social values, changes in Human Resources Management (HRM) tools are emerging. A significant proportion of them use ICT-based solutions and new types of data, which ICT help to create. Naturally, questions arise about the utility of the new methods for organizations that operate in this innovation-intensive environment.

One such new HRM method is the analysis of information from social networking sites (SNS) in the recruitment and selection processes of job candidates. Despite its widespread use by organizations, we know little about its actual usefulness and the reaction of candidates to this type of behavior by recruiters, and scientific research has yielded divergent results. Notably, there is no data to assess which candidates react most negatively to the use of social media screening, in particular whether the use of these methods discourages innovative candidates from applying.

The purpose of this article is to identify factors that promote a positive response from potential candidates to the use of social media information analysis as a selection method, which is often referred to in the literature as cybervetting (Cook et al., 2020; Gruzd et al., 2020), and in particular to see if the use of cybervetting for evaluating innovative candidates elicits negative reactions from them. Based on the data obtained by means of an electronic questionnaire from c.150 young Polish Internet users, it was confirmed that the acceptance for SNS screening for professional content (LinkedIn) is higher than for private content (Facebook). Then it was examined whether factors affecting the perceived justice (the proxy for the acceptance, typically used in recruitment studies--see Anderson et al., 2010) of SNS screening include those that indirectly promote organizational entrepreneurship. Based on a literature review, we hypothesize that the perceived justice of SNS screening (cybervetting) can be predicted by privacy invasiveness, personal innovativeness, self-image management, risk aversion, ability to control SNS information, above average performance self-assessment, a general concern for internet privacy, and--in the case of LinkedIn--having an account on LinkedIn.

The results of linear regression with backward elimination demonstrated that a candidate's perceived privacy invasiveness and self-image management influence the perceived justice for both types of SNSs used as selection tools. However, personal innovativeness increases acceptance for screening private SNSs for this purpose (Facebook). The results of the study expand the scientific knowledge on the applicability of professional-type social media content analysis on innovative candidates, and provide some practical recommendations to help organizations apply social media content analysis without discouraging potential candidates.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Social media and their types

The growth of social media and its widespread use by potential employees has led to interest in the possibility of using the social media content as a source of information in employee selection processes. Social media is usually defined as an IT application that creates a space with user-driven content, and the role of the owner of the application that enables access to this content is only to provide opportunities for users to interact with each other, according to the rules for creating this content. For example, A.M. Kaplan and M. Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content" (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010, p. 61). These applications include social networking sites (SNSs), which aim to create a shared social space where not only interactions occur with the use of extensive capabilities and a variety of expressive tools, but also a sense of social connection is achieved. Their growth in the 21st century has resulted in combining user-constructed profiles with the ability to communicate with others through various types of messages. This enables users to be pseudo-permanently in touch with friends and maintain social ties of various kinds. From the perspective of social media users, they enhance their real-world social relationships, and serve not only as a means to exchange information (Levinson, 2010; Richey et al., 2018; Gonzalez et al., 2019).

However, not all SNSs are private and egocentric. Some are oriented toward creating bonds between people (acquaintances) and raising one's own self-esteem from place of position and by receiving praise (Levinson, 2010, p. 32). Other SNSs (e.g., LinkedIn) focus on professional matters and knowledge sharing, and thus serve to establish professional relationships and discuss professional problems (Levinson, 2010). However, the line between private and professional SNSs is becoming increasingly blurred today (Richey et al., 2018, p. 426). There is a growing number of SNSs' users who treat their online activity as a self-promotional tool, not only in the sense of promoting their contribution to the network, but also in terms of representing themselves to potential job markets (Richey et al., 2018; Jacobson & Gruda, 2020).

Social media (SM) can be divided into three main types: Entertainment networks (a cluster of SM that have to do with general entertainment, such as games, sports, cinema, travel, and so on), Profiling Networks (a cluster of SM that offer functions promoting skills, goals, personal journals, etc.) and Social Networks (a cluster of SM with primary utility of connecting and sharing information) (Koukaras et al., 2020). From the perspective of the current study, the most important division separates SNSs into two types: (a) communities of people who share some type of professional interests (e.g., LinkedIn); and (b) "egological" ones, the purpose of which is building relations among groups of peoples (e.g., Facebook). This division is the one most commonly used in research on the use of SNSs in HR practices (Aguado et al., 2016; Roth et al., 2016; Cook et al., 2020; Roulin et al., 2021). Both types of SNSs "allow individuals: (a) to build a public or semi-public profile within a well-defined system, (b) to articulate a list of users with whom they have a connection and, finally, (c) to see and cross their connections list with others made by different individuals belonging to the same system" (Gonzalez et al., 2019, p. 707). It should be clearly emphasized that from the perspective of their users, these two types of SNSs (i.e., professional and private) have different functions and different rules for the disclosure of personal facts. Both types of networks allow users to use the privacy settings to ensure which of their online activities will not be revealed to others, and individuals may maintain public/private self-disclosure. However, the admiration- and entertainment-oriented private-type networks are characterized by a stronger tendency to reveal private information, while the professional-type network users focus on establishing their positions as professionals worthy of cooperation (which also includes employment).

Social media and their recruitment use

Both types of SNSs contain information that can be useful in the employee selection process (Chauhan et al., 2013; Roth et al., 2016; Zacny et al., 2020) and studies--both academic and industry reports--show that recruiters often use SNSs of both types in the selection process. Given the widespread use of Facebook by potential employees, the Huffington Post reported back in 2012 that "37% of current employers are using social media to find information on potential employees. Of that group, 65 percent use Facebook as their primary tool (Curran et al., 2014, p. 444)". To this day, Facebook is the most widely used SNS. It is not surprising that, according to surveys conducted in the USA and Europe, up to 85% of managers or organizations have used LinkedIn and 78% have used Facebook for selection purposes (Cook et al., 2020, p. 383).

In Poland, the scale of this utilization may be somewhat reduced, as the spread of social networks in Poland was delayed in comparison, and the SNS user base has slightly different demographic characteristics than that of Western countries (Wozniak, 2013). According to 2021 data of Polish industry...