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  • Depends. If you're looking to work somewhere that has a public image, social media is likely to be a factor. Anything involving safety or serious liability will need drug screenings. Outside of that, it depends on how much the company is willing to pay for screenings. They have to pay for them for candidates, and they're not cheap. I've done work in background check software and can tell you costs range from the low hundreds to sometimes over a thousand bucks per candidate, particularly if a candidate has gone by a lot of names and lived in a lot of places. You end up with a big combinatorial of identities to do criminal records requests for from different jurisdictions across the country. Some jurisdictions require a phone call to request records, and I can think of at least one where someone has to literally go pick up documents from a courthouse in person. On top of that, some drug panels are quite expensive. Social media review usually takes a lot of a real person's time to go through; hard to automate if you want to be thorough beyond just pointing at a Facebook profile to scrape and feed through an LLM, and some kinds of posts are relevant to some employers vs others.

    If you're concerned, 7 years is the industry norm for how far back they consider your past unless it's for like a professional certification or degree.

  • Drug tests usually have to be disclosed, so you can check for that. But don’t just ask them straight up if they drug test—that is incredibly suspicious. Instead ask for their policies and/or employee handbook where that will be disclosed. Generally you should try to stay sober while job hunting for several reasons, primarily because some tests can detect residual evidence for months.

    Regarding social media, that depends. It’s best to just assume they would and clean up anything that’s public. You should probably do this all the time, but doubly so when job hunting.

    Current or past employees (would-be-peers, not managers) are an excellent resource for all kinds of information, including this stuff.

  • What country are you in? What kind of job are you applying for? What are the drug laws in your area and/or nation? What industry are the jobs within? Many industries are legally bound to drug test. Does the company do this to prevent legal liability for some reason? Perhaps company reputation, dependability, and/or cost management are important factors for them . Etc etc.

    In short, depending on the area, drug testing is pretty normal.

    As for social media, always assume that your employer, co-workers, and anyone in your life will look up your social media and use it as a basis for understanding and assessing you. If you're concerned about what people will think, then privatize and/or anonymize your social media use.

  • If you're interviewing with someone under 40, the interviewer is going to look you up on social media. Almost definitively, I do not know anyone who doesn't do a quick google search before the interview. May or may not be anything official at an HR level, and for me personally, unless I see something crazy and you're in a visible role, I'm probably not going to say anything.

    We had a guy once who thought his social media was private and he was very wrong. Their interests were stacked pretty heavily towards weed and guns. Would not be a huge problem if it was private and they were able to abstain long enough to satisfy the potential drug screen, but with the amount of visibility, if anything came up, people might start searching for someone to blame for not doing their due diligence when hiring and my team would probably end up being the scapegoat.

    As far as the drug screen specifically, I do not understand the methodology HR uses to determine whether someone needs to be drug screened during on-boarding. Maybe they know something I don't, but it seems completely random.

    tl;dr: Someone will almost definitely go through it and unless it's actually for real private, you probably aren't as clever as you think in hiding it. The bar though for social media in my experience is pretty low.

  • Ok, do you have any social media where you can be (easily) identified? I mean, full name, your actual picture, searchable by phone number/e-mail that you gave your potential employer, etc...

39 comments