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Comment by HeyLaughingBoy | Hacker News Reader

I keep hearing about practices like this and I wonder how prevalent they are outside of HR.

I've interviewed my share of people. In fact, we just finished hiring for all our open positions and I interviewed most of the candidates. But not once did it even occur to me to check out someone on Facebook or LinkedIn or even google them. What people are doing on their own time simply isn't relevant to the job and I think they're smart enough that if they have something useful and relevant online (like OSS contributions/projects), they would mention it since it can only benefit them.

Am I out to lunch here? Are you guys really googling people you're going to hire as a matter of course? If so, what useful information are you getting from it?

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I think it depends a lot on the role and company size. If it's someone who's joining as a first employee and you're going to be spending 10+ hours a day in the same small office, I think it's very prudent to learn as much as possible about them and determine if you'll be able to work well with them.

If it's a larger company (read: not an earlier stage startup) then I don't think it's as necessary, but I'd still probably do it to vet them a bit.

I happen know a lot of HR people from different organizations and have discussed this very question with them. As a class, they seem discourage this sort of background research, and to strongly discourage hiring managers from doing it directly. Rightly or wrongly, HR people seem to feel it is very easy to cross an ethical or legal line by researching someone online and especially on social networks. They are also probably overly cautious as a class. My guess is that hiring managers are more likely to do this sort of research than an HR person (except in very large organizations where there's a formal "background check" sort of step in the hiring process).

LinkedIn is designed (or at least used) with that in mind - I think it's safe and helpful to check out potential candidates' profiles there. I think checking Facebook is inappropriate, but a lot of people seem to disagree.

I think of LinkedIn as useful for maintaining networks, but yeah, I can see it being useful for checking out a candidate. I just wouldn't bother since people will only put positive things there and that should already be on the resume or they should bring it up in the interview.

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