Screening employee backgrounds goes a step deeper. Trend it appears is to profile an individual based on their social networking websites profiles and posts.

Recruiters and companies find meaning in digging into personal space to know the individual from his or her web presence. Is this ethical? Is the information so found, authentic? Can the information available on social networking sites be used to understand the persona? Can a candidate dispute the information found? Can an employer make consistent hiring decisions based on the findings? Is the information contained online a real predictor of future work behavior? Should hiring decisions can be influenced by personal judgment, including prohibited criteria (sexual orientation, for example)? And most importantly, will background screening companies use this source? Legalities apart there are many pitfalls in using social networking as a tool for checking on employees.

Possibilities are plenty. A youngster's Facebook entry may carry posts and photos which the peer group subscribes to. Will a recruiter decide against recruiting the youngster in later years on the basis of his wild youth? If an individual posts debatable blogs or has a militant activist views on a current topic, will that colour the recruiter's opinion?

There is nothing stopping one from creating a fake profile of either oneself or creating a profile for another; so what is the guarantee that the profile on any of these social networking sites is of the person it claims to be of? Savvier ones can market themselves on these sites once they know their profiles are being screened. The not-so-upright may create fake profiles of their friends and foes as plain mischief or with serious mal-intent. How will a screener separate the wheat from the chaff?

If as predicted, social networking does become a trend in 2008 for background screening, dangerous is too simplistic a word to describe it. It would be a proverbial can of worms with both the to-be-recruited and the recruiter playing dangerous games on a dangerous territory definitely beyond the purview of ethical and corporate background screening.