What exactly are the criteria that are commonly checked/verified during a background check of potential employees? Do verifying agencies/HR review social media accounts on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook etc as well as forum profiles like Reddit, Saidit, Lemmy etc?
No idea about socials, but some will do a DBS check
Depends on the place. If someone is in a public facing role I’d expect it to be a bit more comprehensive.
I don’t think they could check Lemmy or Reddit, unless maybe you used your full name as your username or in a comment and they Google it.
I don’t think HR or verifying agencies CAN dig into your social media. I think it’s just credit scores and criminal convictions.
But, even if that’s not true, which is very possible, I guarantee that your potential boss and any co-workers involved in the hiring process will Google you. That usually brings up court cases or newspaper stories (if there are any), a Facebook, or LinkedIn. If you were dumb enough to post your Reddit name on Facebook… good luck on your job search.
In some circumstances, I have heard of employers asking prospective employees to expose their social media accounts during the hiring process.
In most cases, this seems to be just a formality check of “Is this person exposing their previous company’s info / making threatening statements / generally being an asshole of some kind?” or, in one case, to determine if someone was an anti-vax/anti-science type before they started a medical position.
This wasn’t done by an “agency”, though, and they really didn’t look that deeply. In some cases it seems to come with a wink-wink, nudge-nudge “So these are tooootally all your accounts, riiiight?”
