LAUSR

Cybervetting, or as we discuss more generally, using social media information to assess applicants, is on the rise: organizational use of social media assessment increased by 20% in a 2-year period (2010–2012; Winter, 2013). According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM; 2011), 26% of human resource management (HRM) professionals use social media to assess person–organization fit during selection; more recently, that number has climbed to 43% (Maurer, 2016), and according to SHRM (2017), 84% of organizations report using social media for talent acquisition. Yet, in a review by Van Iddekinge et al. (2016), findings show that recruiter ratings of social media information are generally unrelated to job performance, turnover intentions, and turnover. Thus, there is tension between good measurement practices in industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology and HRM, and the largely uncharted waters of using social media information to assess applicants. In response to Wilcox et al. (2022), we argue first that the term “cybervetting” may be too narrow to include the multitude of ways this practice is examined in the literature and thus describe additional and related research in HRM that examines the same practices using different terms. In service of including more general research on this topic, we broaden our discussion from cybervetting to using social media more generally to assess applicants. Second, the focal article begins the important conversation regarding identity-related implications for individuals who post on social media (e.g., impression management). However, we take this conversation further to explicitly examine the tension that could exist for individuals with minoritized social identities (e.g., an individual with a certain social identity belonging to a group that has historically been marginalized or devalued) who engage in identity management (e.g., disclosure) online. If this involuntary information provided by people from protected classes is used for assessment purposes in selection, this may have very real intrapersonal consequences for those individuals regarding portraying their authentic, true selves online and for organizational representatives, who may be relying on out-of-bounds information. Finally, we address the validity-related implications of an unstructured, unformatted process when using social media information to assess applicants (as do Wilcox et al., 2022), but we extend this conversation to explicitly address the additional adverse impact considerations, that in this case, without established validity evidence, may be even more paramount. In summary, although we understand the ubiquity of using social media information to assess applicants, we emphasize the lack of empirical evidence for this unstructured practice and additional measurement-related threats that arise from using it and conclude with methods-based guidelines for future research that should guide its potential utility.