Interesting Site: Social Intelligence HR for hiring and monitoring social media

Your online “CV” could be about to become more visible

I have long advocated that your online presence will become your curriculum vitae.  In essence, beyond a Linkedin or Viadeo profile, your participation in social networks, comments on blogs and in forums will be used by potential recruiters to understand your level.  Naturally, this presence should be a combination of text and photos and, for the more enterprising, video.  But, you can never be sure what shows up on the recruiter’s desktop/Google search.

Social Intelligence Human Resources

To-date, recruiters and headhunters are having to use Google search to dig for facts.  What they come across can be quite inaccurate if not deceiving.  Depending on your level of online activity, the unicity of your name and the amount of personal information the potential recruiters have on you, they may or may not come across the most representative (or desirable) information.  A well filled-in profile on Linkedin or About.me — with the items YOU want them to see — is a pre-requisite.  But, what about a site that collated all the right information in one place?

This week’s interesting site concerns a startup from last year called Social Intelligence HR, which is designed to help scan and screen an individual’s online (specifically social media) presence.  In essence, the service will use publicly available data (excluding legally inappropriate information such as race, age, etc., according to the country’s laws) to understand better potential candidates, but also for companies to scan for what their own employees are doing on line.

This initiative has not been without controversy.  After starting a preliminary investigation, in June 2011, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission in the US) deemed SocialIntelligenceHR as sufficiently “in line” to suspend its investigation [pdf].   For more, here is a writeup in Forbes on the service.

One more side note: the Social Intelligence HR site gets a bad grade on WOT (web of trust): WARNING! This site has a poor reputation….  Some of the rating clearly comes from people who ar against the site, in principle.

What do you think of SocialIntelligenceHR?  A good or a bad thing?  Personally, I see the level of take-up of such a service in countries being rather heterogenous based on the local culture and the uptake of social media.  I see the purpose, but I question whether it will successfully be able to pull together effective profiles over time (considering the way the social media landscape changes).