What are Social Media and Media Checks?
Social media and media checks are background checks to reduce risks to organisations. The checks are completed by qualified professionals to identify any concerning behaviours in the individuals being recruited. The checks look for things such as bullying, racism, or graphic content.
Through Thirtyone:eight members can complete the following checks:
Social Media: This covers a three-year period, looking at information in the public domain and focusing on the most popular social and professional networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn.
Adverse Media: This involves identifying any adverse media coverage about a person from the top 30+ UK and local online news sites, political and alternative media sources, online news aggregators, media streaming, and social media channels.
Social media (Education): This is like a social media check but focuses on behaviours relevant to the education sector.
"We've been with Thirtyone:eight since 2012. They're excellent, and particularly good at providing advice specific to church roles. They are very efficient and their online system is very good and extremely easy to use."
The benefits of Thirtyone:eight disclosure checks
Safer Recruitment:
Social media and media checks play a pivotal role in safeguarding your organisation. Examining an applicant’s online behaviour offers valuable insights into their suitability for a role.
The checks examine online content both from and about the individual, you can determine if they have traits that may pose a risk, for example, connections to extremism, graphic content, bullying or racism.
Legal Recruitment:
Carrying out professional social media and media background checks removes the risk of discrimination that happens when organisations carry out their own online searches. The Equality Act 2010 prevents employers from asking about protected characteristics that include sexual orientation, age, disability, gender, marital status, gender reassignment, pregnancy, race, and religion. When an employer sees these protected characteristics on an individual’s profile, they put themselves at risk of bias, and making subjective decisions which can lead to poor recruitment decisions. Completing these checks through Thirtyone:eight avoids breaching discrimination laws.
How do the checks work?
Thirtyone:eight offers social media and media checks to members in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The checks are completed via a carefully selected third-party provider, SP Index, who are the leading provider of these types of checks in the UK.
England and Wales:
Members in England and Wales who are registered for DBS checks can complete social media and media checks straightaway. Applicants can be invited in the same way you invite them to start a DBS check, and it can be done as a stand-alone or combined check.
Scotland and Northern Ireland:
Members in Scotland and Northern Ireland can access social media and media checks by completing and returning this short registration form.
How long does it take?
The turnaround time to deliver completed reports is between 2-5 working days. The completed report will not return as a pass or fail but will instead display the findings for your organisation to risk assess what impact this information may have on the individual’s suitability for the role.
The Thirtyone:eight Safeguarding Team can provide support with carrying out a risk assessment and can be contacted at [email protected].
"To be honest I wouldn't do this job without the support of Thirtyone:eight" - Lead Recruiter
Frequently Asked Questions
Informed Consent:
In the same way an individual knows they are subject to a criminal record check before they take on a role, they would also know about these checks and would need to give informed consent. If the person fully understands what they’re agreeing to, including how their information will be used, and gives voluntary, specific, and revocable consent, this aligns with rights-based principles.
Public Domain Use:
Only information in the public domain can be checked. Private accounts or posts cannot be accessed. Accessing data that someone has willingly made public (e.g. A public tweet or blog post) is not a privacy violation, especially if it's used for legitimate purposes like recruitment transparency. The checks would never attempt to hack past an individual’s privacy settings, nor would they ask for an individual’s personal login details, passwords, or usernames.
No, our provider is the only fully compliant online social profiling company in the UK. Our provider will only investigate content found within an individual’s public digital footprint. This is content that has usually been placed online in the public domain by the individual. The reports are completely objective with no consideration or weighting given to protected characteristics at any time. Profiling protects candidates from discrimination by ensuring recruiting companies remain compliant throughout the recruitment process and alleviates the temptation for companies to carry out their own web search, which can violate an individual’s privacy and, in many cases, breach the Equality Act 2010.
Social media checks will only look at content found in the public domain. The searches are looking for consistent online behaviours across a person’s full digital footprint including blogs, shopping habits, professional networks, social networks, media news, search engines, and any general personal listings. The checks would never attempt to hack past an individual’s privacy settings, nor would they ask for an individual’s personal login details, passwords, or usernames.
Carrying out your own online searches is time-consuming, unreliable, likely to be inaccurate and in many cases breaches legislation designed to protect both your prospective employees/volunteers and your organisation. By using a professional service, you can implement a fair and legal online search into your safer recruitment process without risk of breaching any UK legislation.
Before human researchers carry out their research, our provider first completes strict verification and integrity checks. These checks use a combination of data to cross-reference an individual’s online digital footprint to be 100% sure of the accuracy of any reports produced. These sophisticated matrix search techniques ensure more accurate results, more quickly and in more detail than any other online employee checks.
An individual’s data is not held by our provider for any longer than is necessary. The type of data which is temporarily held by our provider for research purposes is limited to that which is usually provided within a traditional job application process or on a CV. No special character data (e.g. bank account details) is used or held by our provider.
The result of each completed profile is retained by our provider within their databases solely for the purpose of maintaining a market benchmark and providing social people data analysis. Any personal details which may have been used during research such as name, address, and date of birth are regularly purged from our systems to provide complete and permanent anonymity. Our provider (SP Index) (Social Media Consulting Ltd) is registered as a data controller with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and complies with all guidelines set out under the UK Data Protection Act.
Google searching is quick, but reading and clicking into hundreds of different sites to identify an individual accurately is impractical, inefficient, and likely to give inconsistent results. Our provider has developed sophisticated searching techniques to accurately locate information quickly. A simple Google search will not generate all combinations of results in the same way our researchers can.
Our provider carries out online social profiling to assess an individual’s online cognitive style across a wide digital footprint. A digital footprint includes much more than just the most recognised sites, such as Facebook, X (Twitter), and LinkedIn. It includes all other websites on which an individual has constructed a public profile.
This may include publicly available information provided on websites such as Amazon, eBay, Blogger, Livestream, YouTube, and many more. The online research landscape encompasses the entire public worldwide web and is done by establishing historic behavioural traits across a wide variety of sites to establish an online cognitive style. Personal dating sites are not included in our research.
No, our provider does not report on political or religious content unless it has been flagged for another reason. For example, violent threats to political figures or political content featuring illegal activity or online bullying would be flagged.
No. Social media and media checks look at the online behavioural style and trends found within an individual’s digital footprint. Social media and media checks should be part of a safer recruitment process in the same way that pre-employment checks such as AccessNI/DBS/PVG checks, and references, are just one part of a recruitment process.